Browsersphere

I stumbled upon a minor player tonight by the name of Wyzo. Beyond a product with a cute and clean website, Wyzo is a web browser built off of Firefox that seems to focus on BitTorrent and social sites like YouTube, Flickr and Digg.

I downloaded Wyzo to get a quick feel for it, and it became very clear that it is indeed a Firefox clone with a few added touches here and there. As someone with some skinning experience, I have to say that I am impressed with the skin they came up with. I’ve definitely seen worse. You can get a feel for what the browser looks like on first launch in the following screenshot (click it to see the full-sized version):

The bottom-line is that Wyzo doesn’t seem worth a download just yet when you can just as easily run Firefox and get the same feature set. My guess is that adding something like the AllPeers extension and the Orange-look theme would give you a similarly looking and functioning browsing experience while using the more popular of the two browsers.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Wyzo, though, check out their website or download it and play around.

I’ll let you know if I read any more about Wyzo once it matures beyond alpha quality and toward its first stable release.

Tags: Add-ons, Alpha, Extensions, Firefox, Minor Players

Alex Faaborg has written about CoScripter over at the Mozilla Labs site. CoScripter is a new Firefox extension, and Alex describes it as follows:

What do you get when you mix one part automation, one part natural language interpretation, two parts programming by demonstration, and three parts online collaboration? If you stir all of these research areas together and toss in some XUL, you get one of the most innovative extensions for Firefox: CoScripter.

CoScripter was created by a research team at IBM led by Allen Cypher, and it allows you to record your actions on the Web, play them back, and share them with others. For instance, one popular script quickly automates the process of adding your phone number to the national do not call registry.

Head on over to his original post for the full details.

Tags: Add-ons, Extensions, Firefox

Paul Kim announced Firefox Campus Edition today, a customized version of the Firefox browser focused on the back-to-school crowd. The Firefox bundle, which has its own landing page, reportedly comes pre-packaged with FoxyTunes, StumbleUpon and Zotero extensions. For more details and some additional insight into the release, be sure to head on over to Paul Kim’s announcement.

Tags: Add-ons, Customized, Extensions, Firefox