Mozilla Revamps F1, Makes Firefox More Social

Mozilla has released an updated version of its F1 browsing extension. F1 is from the Mozilla Messaging team and is designed to make it easy to share links across various social services. Rather than having to rely on “share this” buttons on a web page, users can just hit F1 on their keyboards (or “function” F1 for Mac users) and select the service they want to use.
When Mozilla released the first iteration of this extension back in November, we welcomed the idea of a browser-focused sharing system. With the latest release, however, Mozilla has really upped the ante and improved the look and functionality of the extension, as well as adding support for more services.

New Look and Feel

The old version of F1 wasn’t unattractive — in fact we complemented the clean design. The problem, however, was because sharing buttons spanned the horizontal length of the browser, it could get cluttered and ungainly if used with too many services or on browser windows of odd widths.
The new interface features a vertical layout that stacks each service on top of another, displaying the sharing template only for a selected service. The content of the browser also remains unchanged in this implementation, with the overlay simply floating atop the webpage.
We like this look much better and find it effective and unobtrusive. This new video shows the plugin in action:

New Services and Features

In addition to a new UI, F1 has also added support for more services. LinkedIn joins Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Google Apps and Yahoo. Facebook and Twitter have also received additional capabilities. Users can now send a direct message to other Twitter users using F1 and they can also share with group walls on Facebook.
Finally, the Google Apps and Gmail templates have received an update to include a thumbnail of the link being shared.

The latest version of F1 isn’t just about adding new features — it’s also about taking old features away. This release will only work on the Firefox 4 beta. That means users of Firefox 3.6 will need to make the move to the Firefox 4 beta or forego the update.

Mozilla says that the decision to move to Firefox 4 only was because of some of the new UI techniques. Now in its 11th beta, Firefox 4 is stable and fast. We wouldn’t say that F1 is a reason to make the move to the new browser but it will be one of the many benefits.

What we would love to see with F1 would be an API that developers can use to plug their own services into the plugin. Having one sharing bar built into the browser is a useful concept but it gets more useful when more services are supported.

What do you think of F1? Do you use any browser extensions or bookmarklets to easily share links? Let us know.