subject: A New Add On For Firefox And Internet Explorer Comes In The Form Of Cooliris. [print this page] Firefox and Internet Explorer bring you a new add on that changes and enhances the way you view compatible sites. Cooliris is free and makes those mundane sites a lot more pleasing to the eye.
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. Other big sites such as Flickr, Deviant Art, Picasa and Bing are featured in a drop down box on the top right hand corner of the page. Additionally Cooliris can be used to search images in the same manner from designated folders on your PC but disappointing seems unable to do the same for video files.
Once installed Cooliris is never intrusive; it can only be seen in the form of a small logo next to the search bar on your browser. This logo 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 'window shopping' and purchasing 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. Cooliris may not be an essential or particularly groundbreaking download but it is definately worth the 2.9mb download to enhance your image/video browsing or even to get a bit of shopping done.
