My Friendly Fox

Posted April 27, 2007

Recently I began working on a project for SpreadFirefox to help, well, spread Firefox. To do this, my group and I created My Friendly Fox. Our first Friendly Fox is My eBay Fox, a version of Firefox that has been customized to help people use eBay more effectively.

In order to make My eBay Fox useful for people, I built the eBay Toolbar for Firefox, which gives users easy access to all of the important parts of eBay and a handy set of tools like price comparison, consumer reviews, and shipping information. The coolest part, though, is that when you do a search in eBay, the Toolbar will go out and find preview images for all the items that don't have them, so every item in the list of results will have a preview next to it, even if the seller didn't pay for one.

One of the biggest advantages of Firefox is how flexible and customizable it is with Firefox Add-ons. Unfortunately, for most people, finding and installing add-ons is just too much of a pain. So we decided to remove that process and offer people Firefox installations which have been customized for the way they use the internet.

My eBay Fox is the first of what will become a suite of customized Firefox installations. Right now we are thinking about what the next group will be, possibly social networking sites, other shopping sites, craigslist, etc. Since we're still looking, if you have any suggestions, we'd love to hear them! (You can just put them as a comment to this page.)