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Mozilla To Add Screenshot Sharing Feature To Firefox Test Pilot Program (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: [Softpedia reports:] "Mozilla plans to include a webpage screenshot sharing feature to Firefox as part of the Test Pilot program, a spokesperson confirmed to Softpedia. The new feature is called Page Shot, and will initially roll out on Firefox Test Pilot in late-Q3 of this year. The Firefox Test Pilot program allows users to test experimental Firefox features using a special add-on. Based on user feedback, those features will end up as built-in Firefox features, or self-standing add-ons." The pageshot.net website is now offline as Mozilla prepares to launch the add-on via Test Pilot, but Softpedia has the screenshots. You can view the screenshots here.
We've been able to share screenshots for almost 30 years now, this feature better have some neat use cases over traditional methods otherwise I'm sure this'll just be another bloat feature on an already pretty hefty browser.
Hey look! More features no one asked for!! Is Mozilla now in "throw a ton of shit at the wall and see what sticks" mode?
when did Flower+Shift+3/4 or Shift/CTRL/ALT+PrtSCR became such a difficult task that we need a "Feature" in the Browser for ScreenShots?!?!?!?
Mozila, bloat with gusto!
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Yeah it is a web browser, and one of the oldest job of a web browser is to turn image files and markup into a visual representation. And if you want to somehow capture this visual representation as an image, the best way to do it is through the browser, since the broswer is the authority on how the pages are being rendered.
Previously you had to download an add-on to do this, which is a bit of a pain, and something the browser should support natively, if for no other reason than it is trivially easy for the browser to simply provide the data it already has.
No the browser shouldn't do everything. It should only do things that are browser related. This is browser related.
The article sure seems to describe what simply is a cropping-capable screen capture tool tied to a cloud-based, social web back-end.
Yeah the description and animation of how to use it from the article look really stupid. I hope that's not how this feature it will actually end up. But that doesn't mean the good version of this feature shouldn't be added.
Why add the PageShot feature to the browser when the OS already allows the user to easily capture what's on the screen and has an image editor?
Because the browser is aware of the "canvas" contents of the rendered web page, and the OS only knows the "viewport" contents. This means that if the website contents are larger than the browser window, you only get a partial screenshot. Sure you scroll around to different areas of the page, take screen shots, and stitch them together using a photo editor, but that's time consuming and not really feasible if the web page isn't static.
While I am not a big fan of the extension model mostly because people attempt to make the browser do too much, the browser's core functionality should be supplemented this way to keep the application's file space and resource footprint as small as possible. It also keeps the browser's dev team focused on the core functionality. Let third parties cater to niches.
I agree with the goal of keeping the footprint small. My point is that the ability to simply dump the canvas contents to an image file doesn't really add to the foot print. In fact downloading an extension to do this is probably a much bigger footprint than if they just added it to the core browser. It's such a simple feature, like "save page as html" it could be "save page as image".