Firefox Experiments With Price Tracking For Black Friday With New Price Wise Extension
The Firefox team is cooking up a new batch of experimental add-ons at its Test Pilot site to help make your life hopefully a little easier. One of the add-ons that Mozilla cooked up is Price Wise, which designed to help you track price drops on items you have been thinking about buying. Other extensions at Mozilla's Firefox Test Pilot page aim to make it easier to work and collaborate with others on projects that require multiple web pages of research.
As Black Friday is fast approaching, let's start by taking a look at Price Wise. To use this feature, all you need to do is navigate to an item listed for sell by a supported retailer such as Amazon or Walmart and click the button in the corner. The software will then automatically save the product page URL and the current items current price. Then if the price drops, the software will alert you. You can also check the price at any time by clicking the button again.
Unlike a lot of third-party shopping add-ons, Price Wise doesn't check competing retailers for the best price, which somewhat limits its usefulness. Most of the competing shopping add-ons only show you information when you are viewing a product page though, forcing you to regularly return to the product page to check if its price has changed, creating a bit of a niche that Price Wise fills.
Price Wise should be especially helpful for the upcoming Black Friday season by alerting you the moment an items price drops. As it records the price you saw the item at before, it will also help you to accurately judge exactly how much the price has dropped.
The other new experimental add-on released today by Firefox is called "Email Tabs." If you have ever needed to email several web pages to someone before, then you will likely find this a useful utility. Essentially Email Tabs does exactly that, but without the tedious copying and pasting. When you click the Email Tabs button, a drop down menu appears that shows all of the tabs you currently have open. You then select which of these tabs you would like to send in an email, and then in which way you would like the links to be organized.
Currently the links can be organized in one of three ways. They simplest option is to send them as straight links, but you can also opt to include a screen shot of the page with the link. There is also an option to send a full copy of the page along with the link. I personally find this utility extremely useful for work purposes, but it has strong potential to help with holiday shopping too. If you need help choosing which item to buy while shopping online, with just a few clicks you could send links to whatever you are shopping for to a friend to get their incite.
These add-ons are still experimental and may be unstable and error prone, but we didn't experience any problems when we tested them out. If you would like to give them a try, you can find them on Mozilla's Firefox Test Pilot page.
