A New Add On For Firefox And Internet Explorer Comes In The Form Of Cooliris
There is now a new way to view certain sites online with Firefox and Interent Explorer. Cooliris changes and enhances the way you view certain compatible sites online.
The main draw is the impressive way it presents you with an endless wall of images from your chosen page and allows you to browse them by dragging the page and then enlarging the picture/video of your choice. My description does not really do the effect justice, by comparison it is somewhere between Sci-Fi style smart boards found on CSI/Minority Report and the album selection method on iPod/iPhones. Once you start playing around with the features of Cooliris you realise that although it doesn’t appear to be particularly useful at first, it really is worth having.
While hundreds of sites such as Facebook and Myspace are compatible, I would imagine most people would use Cooliris featured sites like Google image search or YouTube. Many other big sites are also featured in a handy drop down box towards the top right of the page such as Flickr, Deviant Art, Picasa and Bing. When searching through image files stored on your PC, Cooliris can be used and looks impressive. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about video files, Cooliris is not compatible with these files.
Once installed Cooliris is never intrusive; the only sign of it being installed is a small logo that appears next to the search bar on your browser which acts as a shortcut to www.cooliris.com. When visiting a Cooliris supported site this logo changes to a blue and green logo that once clicked takes all content on the page and displays it in the dynamic endless wall format mentioned earlier.
Along with the browsing of images and videos, the add-on has the additional shopping feature that is fully integrated with the Amazon.co.uk for the browsing of their products. I would imagine this is where the revenue for the add-on comes from as there are no adverts to speak of apart from the featured videos which are simply an option available in the many categories available for browsing.
Cooliris really is a lovely add on feature to use and is extremely polished; the only thing that lets it down slightly and occasionaly is the poor resolution of some of the images due to resizing. When I consider that it was trying to display 104,000,000 image results for my search term ‘fish’ however, I find it impossible to hold a grudge.
I would hope more features will be added in the future as there would seem to be quite a lot of scope for expansion especially as I notice certain flash games also seem to be compatible with the add-on. While not an essential download or particularly revolutionary Cooliris is certainly worth the 2.9mb download to enhance your image/video browsing or even to get a bit of shopping done.