When you visit a web site how do you know you’re getting the best experience for you? That’s the question the new Firefox add-on App Discover aims to solve. Once installed, the app could alert you if there were any enhancements (Greasemonkey, Firefox add-ons) or applications (Adobe AIR, Appcelerator Titanium, Fluid, Mozilla Prism) that work with the web site you’re visiting.
Today, finding the latest and greatest apps involves a lot searching around, but with the App Discover add-on, you could potentially discover new apps just by visiting the web pages you use every day. The site would actually tell you if there is an enhancement application available through a notification that appears at the top of the page.
For example, visiting the site Twitter.com could alert you to the availability of the TweetDeck AIR application.
Before you get too excited, understand that App Discover does not quite work just yet – it’s only a proof of concept. In order for it to work, the add-on created by Dion Almaer (who blogged about on Ajaxian) requires the developer to enter a link tag to their web page in order for the it to find the available apps. Because of its newness, no developers have done so just yet.
If App Discover became popular, it could be further customized to include user preferences so you could let the app know what sorts of apps you want to be alerted about – e.g. yes to Greasemonkey, no to Titanium apps. It could also include a social feature which would let you know how many of your friends had also installed the app being suggested.
We love the idea of this Firefox add-on, so we put the question to you developers out there – would you support this add-on? Please?
