INTO, A Sports Add-on from Sony for Firefox

Who would have thought that? Sony has created a Firefox add-on, called INTO, which displays sports news directly in the browser. The extension currently offers football (that is soccer if you are from the US) and tennis, with additional sports promised to follow at a later time.

Before you think that this is your typical news feed add-on that is bringing you headlines and nothing else, read on.

The first thing that you may notice when you install the add-on is that it is on the heavier sides of things with 2.8 Megabytes that need to be downloaded. You will then notice a new icon in the browser's status bar that you can click on to bring up the sidebar menu with information and configuration options.

Five buttons are listed here that you can switch between to access some of the functionality that the extension makes available:

• You can link a Facebook or Twitter account to share news on those sites
• Add news feeds here and receive information whenever they are updated. You can furthermore follow Twitter users here as well. These news can then be displayed in a ticker that is either only shown in the sidebar, or at the bottom of the browser. A click on an item opens it in a new browser tab. You can hide, stop, or close the ticker at any time.

• Alerts displays information about fixtures and live matches. Both tennis and football are enabled by default, with options to disable one or both here. What's interesting here is that they keep you informed about matches with notifications even if the sidebar is not open at the time. This way you stay informed about match highlights even if you are working, studying or doing other activities on the computer.
• News finally lists fixtures, results and player information, again covering tennis and football only at the time of writing. The news section concentrations on large tournaments only, like Wimbledon or the European Championship.
• Here you can show or hide alerts and the news ticker, configure in detail which teams or players you want to follow in each tournament listed in the news section. Leagues and the like may not be listed here as the season is over.

The alert feature is a nice idea, especially for web workers who work on the computer at times when football or tennis matches take place. This way it is possible to receive alerts about highlights of  a match when they happen, and without losing focus on whatever other activities are pursued on the computer at that time.

Update: The Firefox sports add-on has been removed from the Mozilla Add-ons store. You can use comparable add-ons such as Are you watching this