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Firefox Debuts Price Wise, an Experimental Price-Tracking Feature To Help Users Score Top Shopping Deals (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the interesting-updates dept.

The Firefox Test Pilot team on Monday rolled out two new experimental features, one of which is aimed to make this year's holiday shopping a bit easier on your wallet. It's called Price Wise, and it's an online shopping comparison tool that lets you add items from across several retailers to a Price Watcher list. From a report: When a price drops, a notification is automatically sent to your browser, and you can click regardless of what web page you are currently on. For now, Price Wise tracks just five retailers -- Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, Walmart, and the Home Depot -- but the company said it's planning on expanding to cover more outlets in the future.

Elsewhere, Mozilla is also rolling out a new feature called Email Tabs as part of its early adopter program. While Mozilla already offers a service for bookmarking content to read later via Pocket, Email Tabs enables users to choose multiple tabs and send links to one or more of them to their Gmail address. There are a number of options here. Users can choose to send links with screenshots, just links, or links with full articles. Price Wise is only available to users in the U.S. for now.

6 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. So they remove features people use... by mr_jrt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...for bloat like this? Seriously?

    What the hell is wrong with the Mozilla Foundation? Just focus on making a minimal, high-quality, open source browser. That's it. that's literally all you need to do. That's why we have rich extension mechanisms, right? So people/companies can build and add-on whatever gubbins they like without wasting core resources building and maintaining it.

    I despair sometimes, I really do.

    --
    Boo.
    1. Re:So they remove features people use... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sure, it's a test feature, that you have to manually install *now*, but what if it goes further? Is this (or are they, if also considering "Email Tabs") something that really needs to be a browser feature rather than a browser extension? I think that's what people are complaining about. Neither are really pertinent to the browser itself, which is what Mozilla should be focused on. (and I would add Thunderbird)

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    2. Re:So they remove features people use... by Luckyo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Pocket shills called. They wanted to remind you that they already used all those lies in the past, and it may be harder to use the same lies now to push for the same agenda.

  2. Why embed this in a browser? by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seriously. Why does "Price Wise" need to be a browser feature, yet another piece of (unwanted, unneeded) bloat-ware? I can *remotely* imagine a use for the "Email Tabs" thing, but cannot imagine actually ever using it myself. For sure, if these experiments continue on to become full-fledged browser features, they will be two more things I will disable. Thankfully, I have Experiments disabled in FF.

    Dear Mozilla, Concentrate on making a *browser* not a kitchen sink -- we already have Emacs for that.* :-)

    [ * Said as a long, long time Emacs user... ]

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  3. Changing objectives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Firefox isn't a browser anymore, it's a private brand/company, and should be treated as such.

  4. Development priorities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They have three "engineers" (lol) working on pointless fluff intrinsically tied to a Google service, but couldn't spare a single person to maintain the built-in RSS reader, which encourages a decentralized internet and serves users instead of sponsors? Ok then.