It has just been week since Microsoft rolled out Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for testing, and Firefox developers have already replicated two of its new features: WebSlices and Activities. We’ve seen things like these happen in the past, so it’s not really a surprise for any of us.
WebSlices:
WebSlices enables users to add services like weather, stocks, eBay etc to their toolbar and get information without visiting the website. Whenever you click on a WebSlice, you’ll see a down-scaled version of the website, which contains relevant content. Daniel Glazman’s Webchunks extension adds the same feature to Firefox.
There are couple of downsides though. Instead of using the Bookmark toolbar (like IE8), it eats up an entire toolbar for WebSlices in Firefox. Considering the fact that very few WebSlices are available, it’s a total waste of screen space in our browser. The second thing is, adding WebSlices in Firefox isn’t just like how we do it in IE8. Nevertheless, I’d expect these things to be rectified in the future revisions of the extension.
Activities:
With Activities, users can add web services to the right-click context menu of their browser. Michael Kaply has released an extension, which adds a similar functionality to Firefox. Once the add-on is installed, you can add new Activities straight off Microsoft’s website, just the way IE8 users do.
This extension seems to be having some trouble showing up the preview whenever the mouse is hovered over entries. Hopefully, even this will be fixed at some point in future.
[Via: Mozilla Links]
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