Does Firefox Really Need Social Networking Features?

Posted on April 4, 2007

Startup Meme reports that Mozilla is planning to add social networking features to the Firefox browser called the Coop. A sidebar would be added to the browser where people could have an avatar and exchange photos, links, and videos. You can see a mockup of the Coop sidebar here. Startup Meme says Coop will be tough on Flock which was planning to launch a social web browser using Mozilla's code.

The release of Coop will be a killer blow to Flock, a privately backed social browser that is being built on top of Mozilla code base. Flock aims to do exactly what Mozilla has just announced, in fact their is such an overlap of features that the Mozilla team decided to put the snapshot of Flock in their wiki page as an example. Above all it teaches us that building upon others technology is just like building castles on sand. We have now seen this numerous times, first Alexa shutting doors to Statsaholic and now Mozilla decided to build an in house version of Flock.
Another impact of the browser would be on the social networks that rely on the generation of massive page views by users while they are browsing each others profiles. The status information on your friends in the browser sidebar will remove the need to view the profiles on the social networks itself.

Until Mozilla actually launches this feature there is no good way to determine if it will be popular. Web users already have lots of ways to trade links, pictures and videos and it is not clear that they need this feature to be part of the web browser. A post on Zoli's blog explains how many people are much more concerned about the browser's performance than about whether or not it has a nifty sidebar that lets you trade pics with your pals.