For quite some time, the Mozilla foundation was concerned mostly with many iterations of their web browser suite. And although the market share numbers still put IE at number 1, it’s clear that Firefox is the leading web browser, with its innovations, army of supporters and tens of thousands of plugins. Its real competitors are Opera, Flock and - to a degree - IE7, while IE6 is a remnant of an era gone by, and its millions of users are simply not informed well enough to make the switch.

Being on the forefront of the Web 2.0 movement, Mozilla has been somewhat coy about introducing innovation not directly related to web browsing. It’s a pleasant surprise, then, to see them announcing Coop, a project which will introduce social tools to Firefox.

Users will be able to add friends directly in Firefox, and send them notes, images and web pages. The idea behind Coop is to move the popular practice of sending fun web pages via e-mail directly to the browser, but it’s obvious that Coop could become more than this, casting a nasty shadow over Firefox-based social browser Flock. You can try it out as a prototype Firefox plugin here if you have a Mozilla account

Coop is in prototype stage, so it’s not entirely clear which features will make it to the final product. For now, the official description (taken from the Coop project page) is this:

“The Coop will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends. It will integrate with popular web services, using their existing data feeds as a transport mechanism.

Users will see their friends’ faces, and by clicking on them will be able to get a list of that person’s recently added Flickr photos, favourite YouTube videos, tagged websites, composed blog posts, updated Facebook status, etc. If a user wants to share something with a friend, they simply drag that thing onto their friend’s face. When they receive something from a friend, that friend’s face glows to get the user’s attention.”

Although this might seem like a sure success, it’s not so simple. Coop will definitely beat sending links via e-mail - a practice I personally hate, because it fills my inbox with spam - but there are many other types of social networking. For example, I send links to friends via instant messaging, where I can also chat and send files from my hard drive. Someone else might prefer a chatroom, while others will use the myriad of available social networking sites, ranging from del.icio.us to MySpace to Twitter. So, while the idea is definitely a good one, Mozilla should cater to the needs of users who are used to advanced social networking if they are to succeed with Coop.