fligtar's blog » techcrunch http://blog.fligtar.com a boombox is not a toy Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:51:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Nobody’s Perfect http://blog.fligtar.com/2009/12/10/nobodys-perfect/ http://blog.fligtar.com/2009/12/10/nobodys-perfect/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:35:56 +0000 Justin Scott (fligtar) http://blog.fligtar.com/?p=768 An interesting article from TechCrunch was published this morning about Google Chrome’s new extensions platform. I’m very excited to see so much talk about add-ons recently, and Chrome’s extension support shows how important browser customization is.

I’ve been experimenting with Chrome extensions and plan on posting my thoughts on the experience soon, but the TechCrunch article caught me by surprise with some of its statements that I wanted to comment on sooner.

Most notable was the comparison of the Chrome extensions platform to Firefox’s current add-ons platform without a single mention of the Mozilla Labs Jetpack project. Jetpack is an experimentation into what the future of Firefox add-ons might look like using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These add-ons are installed without a browser restart, are automatically up-to-date, and also appear instantaneously in the Jetpack Gallery. And it’s very easy to write a useful Jetpack extension in just a couple minutes that even works on Mac.

As Chrome’s extension support is in beta, I think using our experimental Jetpack platform as the point of comparison would have been fairer.

I was also surprised to see the Chrome extensions gallery characterized as “much more open” with the recent news that Google is rejecting extensions that, in its opinion, take browser customization a bit too far on its properties. Being open is a pretty big deal to Mozilla, so it’s disappointing to see the TechCrunch author feels we lost on that one. The Download Squad article takes a different view on Chrome extensions:

Unlike Mozilla’s add-on site for Firefox, it appears as though things are going to run in a slightly more Apple-esque fashion.
— Lee Matthews, Download Squad

This has been an incredible week for the add-on development world with the launch of the Chrome extensions gallery on Tuesday, their event on Wednesday, our meetup at Mozilla tonight, and Add-on-Con tomorrow. I’m glad that the Chrome team learned from the existing Firefox add-ons platform and made many of the same improvements we have with Jetpack, and I look forward to seeing where the two of us take the next generation of add-ons, because no one has “perfected browser extensions”.

]]> http://blog.fligtar.com/2009/12/10/nobodys-perfect/feed/ 1 TechCrunch: enough with the Twitter posts http://blog.fligtar.com/2009/06/26/techcrunch-enough-with-the-twitter-posts/ http://blog.fligtar.com/2009/06/26/techcrunch-enough-with-the-twitter-posts/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:04:24 +0000 Justin Scott (fligtar) http://blog.fligtar.com/?p=507 I like Twitter. I really do. I like TechCrunch too, and have been subscribing to their posts for years now. But I can’t stand the barrage of Twitter-related posts over the last few months. I decided to take a look at how many posts per day over the last 3 months have been related to Twitter using this handy CrunchBase page. My findings are below:

Graph of TechCrunch Twitter posts per day

There are many blogs out there that are dedicated to covering one service. They usually make that pretty clear in their name. But I think it’s ridiculous for TechCrunch to have 8 posts in a single day related to Twitter (as they did yesterday) and to have only 2-3 days per month where they DON’T talk about Twitter. Twitter being down is not news. Twitter disabling search for a few hours is not news.

I was satisfied just leaving a short comment to this effect on the latest Twitter post, but after doing the brief post count research above and realizing how long I’ve tolerated this for, I’m no longer a TechCrunch reader. If they ever reduce the number of Twitter posts or perhaps split the mind-numbing posts off into TweetCrunch, I’ll be glad to hit the subscribe button again.

And like I said: I actually like Twitter. It’s gotta suck even more for the people that don’t care for Twitter.

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