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Does Firefox really need The Coop?

Tom Clarke

Tom Clarke

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coop-sm.pngMore details are still emerging of what could be Firefox’s next big feature: built-in social networking. Codenamed ‘The Coop‘ this development represents a major change in direction for Mozilla, who now seem to be intent on challenging not only the major service aggregators, but also their own privately-backed cousin, Flock.

The main idea behind The not-very-originally-titled Coop is to allow you to see data on your friends, their Flickr accounts, Last.fm and so on, within a separate pane of the Firefox browser window. At the same time, it will make it easier for you to share new content, links, feeds, etc with your friends without having to open another browser tab or messaging window.

On first sight, The Coop might seem like a great idea (hey, it’ll make it easier for people to communicate with each other and collaborate and ‘Coop’erate too…). However, it needs to be said that Firefox already has some pretty serious problems which Mozilla could be dealing with before they start adding major new features (and the majority of comments at TechCrunch would add weight to this argument). Number one on that list for me would be memory consumption. Yes, OK, I’ve bought an amazing new iMac with loads of RAM but does that mean Firefox should be using 150 MB + of memory just for browsing a few tasteful MySpace profiles? This leads into the issue of stability – why is it that Mac and Windows users alike still report sometimes daily crashes?

Let’s not forget that Firefox was originally developed as an antidote to the bloatedness of the Mozilla suite. Is the emergence of The Coop yet another sign that Mozilla has lost sight of its original aims? In their initial reactions, Firefox users seem to be saying that they definitely don’t want to be left with a broken, socially-adept browser.

Tom Clarke

Tom Clarke

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