The Mozilla Messaging group recently launched a new way to share links called “F1” – a Firefox extension that intends to make sharing content with others on social media sites almost effortless. We see many websites now that use the “share this” buttons above or below every piece of web content, which can be visually distracting and confusing to web surfers.
Mozilla is the first of many companies who are building work-arounds for this common interaction-design problem of the digital age.
F1 gives users an all-in-one frame above the content they’re viewing. Once you connect your accounts, all you have to do is click the F1 icon in the toolbar to share the page you’re viewing with friends on Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. (Those three services were chosen as the first three supported sharing mechanisms for F1 due to their popularity and OAuth implementation.)
In an ideal world-wide-web, if every user was a Firefox F1 user, publishers wouldn’t have waste time putting up share buttons, and users wouldn’t have to connect their social accounts and login credentials to websites around the internet. This would make sharing more secure, simple, and lot easier on the eyes than it is now with all the share buttons everywhere.
Check out this demo:
Mozilla Labs F1 from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.
Mozilla F1 is still in the fine-tuning process and is still being expanded. Mozilla designer Bryan Clark wrote on the company blog saying, “ [Eventually], the system should know which sharing service you use, and offer to use those. That will require sharing services to advertise to the browser that they are offer a sharing API and the browser to see which services you use.
“Furthermore, sharing is not a standardized activity, so some protocol is likely needed for user agents to offer the service they want without having to know about all of them.”
On top of that, he emphasized that publishers can also experiment with this feature; if you’re interested, check out the F1 Wiki for details.
Mozilla F1 is very well designed compared to similar cross-browser and all-in-one sharing frames and toolbars that you’ve seen in the past. It’s too bad there isn’t a cross-browser standard for social sharing, because all of these extra “share this” buttons need to go.