Fantastic Firefox Designs from the Mozilla Creative Collective

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:23:47 +0000

January 7th, 2010 | By: Garin Kilpatrick

Mozilla’s Firefox, is an open source web browser, and the second most widely used web browser in the world. Initially Mozilla’s browser was named phoenix, then firebird, and then after heated trademark dispute Mozilla settled on the name Firefox. The Firefox logo has evolved during these naming disputes, in step with the convergence of traditional and web 2.0 design.

The Browser Wars

Firefox faces intense competition in the browser space from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Safari. Despite the competition Firefox has been able to build an unmistakable brand, and claw away 25% of the web browser market share.
Mozilla recently celebrated their one billionth download of Firefox and this achievement owes thanks not only to Mozilla technology, but also to the appealing design of the Firefox brand. Firefox has an innovative edge over competitors due to the open source nature of their platform. Anyone with the skills to do so can contribute to the Firefox platform by creating an add-on to the add-on directory, or by adding a visual design to the Mozilla creative collective.

The Mozilla Creative Collective

Mozilla takes their brand design very seriously, since it has been one of the secrets to their success. Firefox even has it’s own font. The design of the Firefox brand, much like the development of the browser itself, has been a collective effort. A key reason for the success of Firefox design development, has been Mozilla’s ability to foster a thriving creative community. The Mozilla creative collective is a community where designers from around the world are encouraged to share their Firefox design creations.

By joining the creative collective designers are able to become fans of other designers, write encouraging comments on designs, and achieve badges for successful designs they submit. Below are some of the best designs from recent design challenges the creative collective has held. The following 55 images are hand picked from over 778 designs that have been submitted so far, and more firefox designs are being added all the time. Some of these designs are really fantastic and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Feedback: What is your favorite design above?

5 Firefox Add-ons for Windows or OS X

admin — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 06:23:51 +0000

Updated: August 23rd, 2009

By: Garin Kilpatrick

The following four Firefox Add-ons work for either Windows or Apple OS X version of the Firefox Web Browser and have the potential to make your Web Browsing experience more organized and awesome all around!

As you can see in the Top of my browser icons are added beside the address bar where I can easily view my feedly feeds (green icon) or tag a Website with delicious.

1. Feedly

Feedly for Firefox is a very cool way to import your favorite feeds into a magazine like layout. Feedly has integrated twitter support, and powerful commenting and search. Check out this quick guided video tour of feedly in HD.

2. Google Preview

Google Preview allows you to view a preview image while searching, enabling you to view a site before you visit it. If you like the idea of viewing preview images of websites while you search check out this link to a post on 3 ways to Preview sites you search for.

Google Preview has 6,924,000 downloads already and this is significant because these millions of people have already built the preview image database. A pre-existing image database means that load times for searching remain fast despite the images.

3. TwitterFox

TwitterFox is an add on for Firefox that will give you an easy to use Interface for Twitter. Twitterfox is accessible via a small icon on the status bar, and this icon also shows you the number of updates that have received since the last time you clicked it.

4. Delicious Bookmarks

The Delicious Bookmarks add on is perhaps my favorite of all. I like delicious because it allows me to access my bookmarks from anywhere, and easily share them with my friends. It is the add on that I use the most often, and I use it with multiple accounts. There is no sense of me re-explaining how it works because delicious has already built a page that will give you a quick tour of the features that have helped it receive almost five million downloads.

5. Firebug Live Web Development

As you can see from the picture below, each of the above add-ons has an icon in the status bar. The one application icon in the bar below to the left of “GP” is a bug icon for the add-on Firebug. Firebug is a cool web development tool that allows you to inspect any element of a webpage, like the html or css, and make live changes. This is a great tool for beginner and advanced web developers alike, but slows down the web browsing considerably if left running in the background.

Summary

The above Firefox add-ons are only a good few of a large many. There are literally thousands of add-ons available for Firefox. The current stats from the mozilla website tally 1,516,119,146 add-ons downloaded and 174,639,202 add-ons in use.

Feedback:

What is your favorite Firefox add-on? Would you add the add-ons in the article above? Disqus commenting is below.

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