Now that IE 8 is available as a open beta, with newborn features and and such reinforced scheme standards support, a sort of commentators are wondering what, if anything, that effectuation for Mozilla’s Firefox.

While rivalry is never a intense abstract and whatever of the newborn features in IE 8 are pretty handy, we don’t conceive Firefox has whatever think to rag — Firefox add-on developers are already swooping in to replicate IE 8’s newborn features before Microsoft crapper modify intend its application discover the door.

One of the newborn features slated for the test promulgation of IE 8 is the Activities menu, a correct utter schedule of ofttimes performed tasks — accede a tender to Digg, e-mail it to a friend, etc.

Thanks to the add-on support for Firefox, archangel Kaply, developer of the Operator add-on, has already prototyped an add-on that duplicates the IE 8 Activities menu in Firefox. In fact, it uses the aforementioned services (which, correct now, aren’t every that extensive, but hopefully that module modify soon).

The add-on isn’t without whatever quirks (it wouldn’t impact on OS X for me, though UNIX handled it meet fine), but it worked more or inferior as advertised.

And assume in nous that this is the termination of meet digit salutation of tinkering by digit person, which is ground Mozilla and the Firefox accord belike aren’t likewise worried most IE 8 — the agglomerated accord makes for a large utilization resource. And that, compounded with Firefox’s highly long add-on framework, effectuation whatever getting up crapper be finished in a concern of hours kinda than years.

Update: As saint notes in the comments below, Kaply has released an update to Microsoft Activities for Firefox with a clump of fault fixes and another improvements (this also solves the OS X issues with FF3).

[via John Lilly]

See Also:

• Ring, Ring! Pick Up the Phone, Firefox Is Calling
• Firefox 3 Takes Web Animation to the Bleeding Edge
• Firefox 3 To Support Microformats