I’ve always loved Mozilla Firefox and it’s been my favorite Internet browser for a few years running now. While increased security is still my biggest concern and much of the reason I use it (particularly when combined with the Noscript addon), there are plenty of other uses I’ve found for Firefox addons. The BuddyFox addon gives a new spin to integrated chat, however. Buddyfox is essentially an Instant Messenger service for your browser. Still in Beta, it follows you around wherever you go, and was recently released a few days ago on June 11.
As you might expect, the layout is still in it’s early stages. The messenger sits down at the bottom of your browser much like Gchat hangs out at the side of your e-mail. There’s a rudimentary buddies list letting you know who is around browsing the web while you are and your run of the mill timestamped chat log is to the right of your list. I’d imagine we’ll see additional features added as they become available and you’ll be getting in on the ground floor of this new addon considering so far there have been just shy of 90 downloads. I think it makes for a fun toy, to be sure, but not something I would use on a day to day basis until more of my friends start picking it up (I persuaded my older brother to install a copy but was met with an immediate “meh”). It is admittedly pretty nice having the chat built into your browser, but I hope they never add a “feature” letting you know where you’ve visited recently.
While not the be-all end-all of addons, Buddyfox has one simple function and it seems to accomplish that without hogging a lot of memory or causing a lot of crashes/bugs. It isn’t as robust as other social media offerings out there such as the Facebook and Twitter Firefox extensions or quite as snappy as the 1-click Youtube video downloader, but hey, give it some time. I mean it’s only been out for a few days, right? Do you remember the original Facebook when it first started? Not exactly the empire it is today, to be sure.
