At O’Reilly Radar, Tim O’Reilly points to Paul Kedrosky pointing to Lifehacker’s Better Gmail. The FireFox extension looks like it brings some real power and extensibility to already powerful GMail platform. Tim notes:
A really interesting side note: as Better Gmail is a firefox extension, its not available for IE users. Its an interesting twist on the browser wars. In the old days, Microsoft and Netscape fought to lock in users with incompatible extensions. Here we see the same thing happening simply because that one platform is open and the other is not. The users themselves are evolving the browser.
I agree with Tim’s observation, but cringe at the term “users.” Many years ago I attended a session in Redmond where I heard two ‘Softies talking about the product they were shipping and referring to us as “users.” The product was Visual Studio. We’re not users, I thought, we’re developers! We’re producers. So, “users” aren’t evolving the browser. We need to get out of this “us – them” mentality. We are the users. We are the producers. We make the world we choose to live in, by action or inaction. There are no “users.” Only us.
Okay, enough ranting. GMail extensions look pretty cool. Check them out!