Meebo Firefox Extension

Meebo has released a Firefox extension for its web messenger. Lots of people have been waiting for them to release something to eliminate keeping Meebo in a tab. Although this doesn’t mean you can close the tab, it doesn’t need to be currently active to know that you have received a message or that someone is online.

I first heard about this extension from Chris over at Solo Technology. He’s the same one who made it possible to Run Meebo As Its Own Application.

I am impressed with this extension. I don’t install very many extensions, because I don’t like to slow Firefox down, it already uses enough memory by itself. Besides, the browser is perfect as it is.

As you can see from the screenshots, it visually notifies you that you’ve received a new message or that someone has gone online/offline.

What I Like

• I like the notification popups above the system tray.
• I like that there are several different ways of letting me know that I have new messages.
• I like the look of Meebo in the sidebar, even though it could be improved (see What I Don’t Like).

What I Don’t Like

• I like that it shows the recent messages, but does it necessarily need to list all of them? I should be able to customize this to display at least the last five recent messages so my contact list doesn’t scroll so much.
• When listing the recent messages, they should be separated from any messages above or below. It’s easy to see that each message has a timestamp and is in quotes, but they are just too close to each other.
• I like the notification popup above the system tray, but it moves too quickly! I would like to see an option to set the length of time it sits there and how many popups are shown at a time. Currently, if there’s a new message right after another one, it displays the most recent one, so the previous popup disappears too quickly.
• The tab must go. Even though I don’t need to constantly look at it now, it still adds to the memory usage. It would be great if messages could appear in the current tab even if Meebo isn’t the current tab. And, possibly minimize to Firefox’s status bar (or above it).

Overall, I like this extension even with a few annoyances. I hope to see more improvements in the future. Just don’t take away the features that I like, please!