Firefox Gets Social with Facebook

Today, we’re excited to announce that Firefox is getting social with Facebook Messenger for Firefox, which is built on a new Social API for the Web.

Firefox is the Web browser of choice for hundreds of millions of people worldwide and as social sites have become a key part of people’s online lives, we want to make it easier to use the Web the way you want. People visit social sites throughout the day to chat with friends and get real time updates about new activity. In fact, most people online visit social sites to account for about 20% of all time spent online worldwide.

We experimented with new and better ways to integrate social into your Web experience and are excited to launch our first social integration with Facebook Messenger for Firefox! You can read more about our work with the Facebook team in this post.

To get started, just upgrade to the latest Firefox and then visit the Facebook Messenger for Firefox page and click “Turn On.” You can watch this video to see how it works.

Once you enable the feature, you’ll get a social sidebar with your Facebook chat and updates, like new comments and photo tags. You’ll also get notifications for messages, friend requests and more that you can respond to right from your Firefox toolbar.

Facebook Messenger for Firefox lets you chat with friends and stay connected with their updates wherever you go on the Web, without needing to switch between or open a new tab. You can chat with your friends and family while doing anything from shopping online for the perfect gift, cheering your team on in the big game, watching a video or just surfing the Web. Of course, if you’re not feeling social, you can easily hide the sidebar or even disable the feature.

Today’s Facebook integration is just the start of making Firefox more social. We’ll soon add support for more features and multiple providers.

Mozilla is a non-profit organization with a mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web and we can’t wait to see what cool Web experiences developers will build on our Social API. We want to build a social standard for the Web to give developers more opportunities and users more choice, much like we did with our work on OpenSearch. Imagine using the Firefox sidebar, toolbar buttons and even an AwesomeBar button for news, music, finances, email, group projects and more.