We’re pleased to introduce the Firefox Share alpha add-on, a spinoff from the F1 add-on you may already be using. Firefox Share is a descendant of F1, but it differs in a few significant ways that we’ll describe below. We’d love for you to try it and send us feedback to improve it.

We’re developing Firefox Share as an add-on so it can evolve in parallel with the rest of Firefox. Firefox Share works with all current Firefox versions.

While Firefox Share is derived from F1, there are changes in the interface and under the hood:

• Most obviously, Firefox Share looks different. It’s been styled to integrate with the look & feel of Firefox, so it will look Mac-like on a Mac, Windows-like on Windows, and Linux-like on Linux. It will get prettier and more usable as we continue to iterate.
• Firefox Share uses a different architecture than the original F1. F1 used a stateless server as a proxy to communicate between your browser and the service providers, because it was faster to build that way. For a variety of reasons, we’ve now moved to a pure-client-side solution, and the Share-enabled browser communicates directly with the service providers. This will make scaling to lots of users easier for us (no Mozilla servers needed!), and mitigates some security concerns.
• We have a plan in place to support a long-tail of service providers, so you won’t have to try and convince us to implement your favorite sharing provider. We want our favorites too! More on that soon.

One other note: Since this alpha has been focused primarily on the re-architecture, we regret that we’ve had to drop a couple of features, including support for LinkedIn, Google Apps, Yahoo, and multiple accounts per service (e.g. multiple Twitter accounts). We hope to add these back over time in upcoming releases. We’ll keep you informed as Firefox Share continues to evolve and moves out of alpha.