Two new Firefox Test Pilot projects: Price Wise and Email Tabs
Mozilla launched two new Test Pilot experiments for the Firefox web browser today. Price Wise is a price tracking extension that monitors products on select sites for price drops.
Email Tab, the second new experimental extension, adds options to copy a selection of open tabs to the Clipboard or emails.
Mozilla launched Test Pilot in 2016 to test certain ideas related to Firefox. The main goal behind Test Pilot is to find out whether features are good additions to the Firefox web browser or better kept as standalone extensions.
Some test pilot projects, the screenshot tool Page Shot or Tracking Protection or Firefox Containers, have been integrated into the Firefox web browser; others such as Snooze Tabs or No More 404s have not found their way into the browser.
Price Wise
Price Wise is a price tracking extension for Firefox. The extension is clearly designed for the U.S. market; the list of supported shopping sites includes Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Best Buy and Home Depot at the time of writing.
Price Wise spots price drops on things you’re interested in at Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Home Depot and Walmart. When Price Wise finds a price drop, the add-on gives you a heads-up about the lower price.
The extension supports only the *.com versions of the shopping sites and not local versions. In other words: you can use it on amazon.com or ebay.com, but not on ebay.co.uk, or amazon.de.
The extension highlights if you can add a product to the list of tracked products. Just click on the extension icon and select the "add" option to have its price tracked from that moment on.
Price Wise lists all added products in its interface and notifies you when it notices a price drop. A click on a tracked product opens the shopping page it was added on so that it can be bought directly provided that it is still in stock at the time.
The extension has no options at the time of writing. You cannot set a desired price for an item or cross-check the price to find out if an item is cheaper or available at another supported retailer.
Some of the best shopping extensions for Firefox support the functionality and more already.
Email Tabs
Email Tabs is the second experimental extension that Mozilla launched today. The extension can be used to copy a selection of tabs, or all tabs, to the Clipboard of the operating system or using email.
Ever needed to save or share a whole bunch of tabs as you research, shop, or just browse the web? Email Tabs lets you create beautiful emails from your open tabs to save them for later or share them. You can use Email Tabs to automatically send along links, screenshots, or even the text from articles.
The email integration makes use of templates to display the links in an elegant way. The current version of Email Tabs supports Gmail only.
Placeholders for Yahoo Mail and Outlook are included but the functionality is not there yet.
Closing Words
Firefox users in the U.S. who don't want to install a full-blown shopping extension -- for whatever reason -- may install Price Wise to track the price of items on popular U.S. shopping sites.
Gmail users who use Firefox as a browser may install Email Tabs to improve the collecting and sending of site information.
Now You: What is your take on the two Test Pilot projects?
“What is your take on the two Test Pilot projects?”
Neither of these are even remotely of interest to me. However, and I realize that this is a bit unfair, the existence of stuff like this really does make me wonder about what Mozilla is doing. There’s still so much work and refinement required for Firefox in terms of performing its basic functionality that every time I hear about projects like this I think “why are they spending resources on this crap rather than what is supposed to be their main work?”
Firefox decided long ago to prostitute itself out for money. Now they spend much of their time figuring ways to influence and spy on their user base employing the lure of convenience. At this point the only way to fix firefox is to spend a bunch of time blocking IPs, scrolling through the about:config (with each new update) or you can use a privacy oriented browser. Websites play along by breaking things on all but newer browsers. I called my broker and bitched at them for 10 minutes because certain features only work with chrome or ie. There’s too much stress in life already to worry about this bullshit.
Prise Wise is another “business opportunity” for Mozilla’s Firefox. Is prostitution of software legal in California ?
Despite all those widely vaunted words about safety and privacy of Firefox, I see increasing Mozilla and Google’s cooperation if not deeply penetrating symbiosis, all step by step to not scare users – google api (chromium), google search, google disk, google mail. What else, or what next?
Not mentioning that _all_ browsers are being developed in such a way as to create inner structure of micro operating system. That’s why I use the best HTML browser Links2 in Debian. It works with other apps if you want AV also, but that’s another story.
lol, a democracy owned by china to sell stuff. I see now.
The people behind this new Mozilla certainly have a cognitive dissonance.
What a terrible old-fashioned shop list where is the modern website like alilExpres ( https://www.aliexpress.com ).
I really do not understand why there not also on the list? 51% of the U.S.A. is in Chinese possession, 40 % is in the hands of the rest of the world, so the U.S.A is really one of the branches of Alibaba!
Thanks a lot for the article !
The shopping extension seems very promising, hopefully they soon extend the support to non .com sites !
No, these things are not part of a browser, they’re add ons. This is what makes windows so dreadful, the OS has nowhere significant to go so junkware is added and added until the core product is massively messed up.
Same with browsers, they all work so how do you make yours stand out? Hire a marketing team born in a bubble who thinks all users are infatuated with tech junk and the fleeting status of having new features. I doubt that will work.
How does it go? If software works, it needs more features!
The email tabs is useful but there are already ways to do the same thing such as saving links. It’s a way around tracking blocks, though; add tabs to email and they’re probably going to be mined unless you use encrypted email.
Soon, I may have more about:config settings disabled than enabled!
Formerly an empowering browsing utility, Mozilla Corporation turned Firefox into an ad platform.
http://thereisonlyxul.org/
Stop answering to that kind of “news” nobody is interested for.
Ditched FireFox. It’s a scam now.
What are you using now ? I guess a chromuim based browser .
Well said, John Doe, well said!
*** bragging alert ***
About “email tabs” project:
I did something similar year ago in my Opera extension, V7 Tabs.
Idea was to easily transfer session to another browser (if user have many tabs).
Extension creates simple HTML page with all the links from first browser and writes it into clipboard, so that user can paste it in address bar of another browser (without the need for extension in second browser)
https://imgur.com/aKxJRMW (it’s little slow because of gif recorder)
*** end of alert *** ツ
Yeah I don’t think any of these will bring back ex Firefox users.
Even the Worst Firefox is still much better than any other browsers. These suckers and the EvilCorp would be satisfied only if Mozilla and firefox were finally dead.
Sigh, whatever happened to browsers just being browsers???
Now they all want to integrate everything and the kitchen sink, well that is everything that is not needed, while not integrating the stuff that is really needed.
For instance, why can’t/won’t mozilla integrate a way to save pages in mht format, other major browsers have that feature built in, yet mozilla refuses to integrate that feature, but at the same time keeps integrating “features” no one ever asked for (pocket, price wise, etc)?
Stop it!
Just STOP.
Because mht is not web standard? Fill your complain to W3C for them to make mht a standard
Damn right! The way I see it, they’re having a competition to see who can build the first gigabyte-sized web browser! Many of us just want the browser to be a browser. Mozilla, you could offer these extra features on a new tab page that gets displayed to the user the first time a new Firefox installation is opened, and offer to install them *as add- ons*. That would be 100% perfectly acceptable. But the madness of integrating every feature under the sun into the core browser needs to stop. My puny 8 GB laptop says thanks.
But, I suspect that things like this are about money, not building a better browser for the user. And as the browser vendor, you stand to make a lot less money if the user is required to consent to the installation of these services rather than them being integrated into the product by default. Hence the direction things are heading.
@Kevin these are optional addons. In fact you need to first install test pilot, then install the test addons you’re interested in.