If you build a great web site, people visit, have a good time and eventually leave. If you build a great Firefox extension, you have the potential to improve every minute of someone’s browsing life. Think about how much time we spend browsing the web – improving someone’s browsing experience is powerful!
If you build a game in a Firefox extension, you can mix play with all our actions online. Firefox might seem like an unlikely platform for Games. It’s a browser, right? Firefox is a way that people can reach other information.
But Firefox represents something more. Firefox is the chosen browser. Unless you run Linux as your primary operating system (and few people do), you had to choose Firefox over Safari, or Firefox over Internet Explorer. Why would you choose Firefox? Because it’s more secure, perhaps. Or because it’s faster on your system. Or maybe you chose Firefox because it’s flexible and open – anyone can make an extension that will improve some part of your online life. At GameLayers we believe that social fun is a big improvement in everyday browsing.
According to Asa Dotzler’s recent graph, Firefox is a growing orange swath across the web. Increasing numbers of people are choosing their browser. What could make Firefox grow further? Firefox for folks who like to be entertained!
Here are two slides, one from a May 2009 O’Reilly Radar presentation on popular app categories on Facebook, another slide from Mobclix, indexing iPhone app downloads:
I’ve put a giant red arrow next to “games” on each of them – games occupy the most minutes for Facebook apps, and games rule the number of free downloads on iTunes. So where are games on addons.mozilla.org?
addons.mozilla.org is evolving to suit a broader range of users – beyond the geeks, privacy junkies and web developers who love Firefox today. The folks behind addons.mozilla.org (AMO) have been redesigning the site to make Firefox extensions appeal to a broader audience. Combine that with JetPack, an easy extension-builder, and we’re likely to see an increasingly broad range of innovations in the browser.
So where are the games in Firefox? Let’s look first at MozHunt – a community driven scavenger hunt. Can you find the pandas hidden across the web? Then you can report back to the MozHunt headquarters. MozHunt recognizes that the Internet itself can be a game. The web is a giant playfield!
MozHunt isn’t a Firefox add-on, it’s not even up and running when this article is published. Rather it’s a Mozilla Community hint at what we might see in the future: gameplay integrated into the network itself.
RocketOn is one Firefox extension attempting to integrate browsing and gaming. They’ve built avatar based chat and minigames in a simple Flash layer you can drop down on to a site. Web pages become chat rooms and fields where you might play casual games with friends or strangers.
We’ve built The Nethernet – a full featured MMO (massively multiplayer online) game in Firefox. You can leave traps or treasure on web sites, stumble across Portals and Missions leading you to new parts of the web.
We released The Nethernet about a year ago. Now thousands of folks are playing each day, playing a multiplayer game as they surf. Here’s one of my favorite player comments about The Nethernet: “Come metagame the internets with me. Join the chaotic faction and lets spread dissidence through the tubes.”
Come metagame the internets with me! Let’s play across the web, across our browsers! We are all sitting together online using Firefox, an open extensible browser, connected to the internet, browsing the global brain – let’s play games together while we’re here.
Thanks to Nick and Justin at AMO for hosting a great add-ons meetup and giving me a chance to share these ideas with that crowd. If you’re an extension developer, or considering extension development, join the conversation through the AMO blog. Or, talk about Firefox Games in The Nethernet forums.
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May 29th, 2009 at 16:50
[...] for an add-on parsing tool, followed by a Chromebug demo by John J. Barton and a presentation on games in Firefox by Justin [...]