Mozilla Firefox Snowl Evolved To Version 0.2
Mozilla Labs Firefox Snowl
Mozilla Labs first introduced Snowl in the first half of August 2008. This open source project has now evolved to its latest version 0.2, as of January 12, 2009. If you are wondering what Snowl is all? Then read on, we all know that messaging or conversing is a very common activity, and a number of desktop or web applications support this, but with the increasing variety of providers or protocols it is getting very hard to keep a track of all these conversations.
Snowl is an Experiment with Messaging in the Browser by the Mozilla Labs as an answer to the above stated problem.
It’s a prototype Firefox extension that integrates messaging into the browser based on a few key ideas:
- It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.
- Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones.
- A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later.
- Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages.
as stated by Myk Melez when he was introducing Snowl.
This new version is now having an updated river view which now shows a single column of messages by default, groups them by time, and includes preview images and excerpts. It is also having a new stream view for keeping track of messages in a sidebar while you do other things. It’s a simpler, more compact window into the flow of incoming information that you can leave open at the side of your browser and glance at occasionally for the latest updates. Now you can send and receive tweets from multiple Twitter accounts.
Even though Snowl has evolved from its initial prototype version to version 0.2, it is still in its early stage of development with many bugs, and subsequent versions may include changes that break functionality and delete all your messages, making you start over from scratch. So use it for the purpose of testing its functionality only.
[ Download Snowl ]
