ProductiveFirefox

Business, Revenue and Sustainability

The ProductiveFirefox addons are actively developed - inhouse, as open source, and occassionally by contract - and so require an active income to fund the ongoing work and manage the open source initiative.

We achieve this through donations rather than fixed payments. Donations enable much-needed flexibility, letting the user to choose the value they place upon the tools, and efficiently handling the global economy. So most users will donate a good amount, a few will donate a very large amount, and some will only donate as much as they can afford. This is supplemented by sponsorship (currently in the form of AdSense on the forum/website) and our Store (where we take a small commission on any purchases).

The continuous arrival of new donations is crucial to the sustainability of the addons, which even when not in major development still require regular maintenance (observe GTDInbox constantly being tweaked to stay afloat on Gmail). Therefore we manifest our gratitude to all users who donate with a ProductiveFirefox Member account, that gives various benefits such as early access to updates, special recognition on the forum, and more practical tools, such as the ability to synchronise settings across multiple machines.

If you would like to donate, please select the product you’d like to donate for: Donate to Support GTDInbox.

History

My history with Firefox extensions date back to September 2005, after concluding a leisurely jaunt around Asia. As a direct consequence of seeing the impact of the Khymer Rouge (the trip had ended in Cambodia), I was feeling a bit fed up with the world. I felt compelled to - in my own humble way - give something back, and since the power of browser extensions had always intrigued me, that’s what I began doing.

The first extension was Bumble Search, which cheekily remixed the Web, adding Yahoo to Google, and eBay to Amazon. Bumble Search was declared deceased in early 2007, due to unmaintainable code (it was the first!), but I love the concept and may well revisit it.

This was followed midway through 2006 by GTDGmail, which despite my lack of prior knowledge of GTD, seemed to make a lot of sense. That was developed for over a month with no feedback, and no idea if it appealed to anyone else, before launching to a positive reception that exceeded all expectation. It splashed on some major sites like Lifehacker, Digg, 43 Folders & Lifehack; has a suprisingly strong following amongst Google engineers; and just for good measure, nearly got me sued for copyright infringement (hence the name change GTDInbox)

In late 2006, work on WebCards began - an extension to visualise Microformats within a page (Microformats are semantic objects to represent people, events, places, etc.). It was an interesting prototype, but the UI was all wrong for practical use, and so it was dropped. But fortunately, the parser was pretty good & salvageable enough to be given to Mike Kaply, who went on to use some of the key concepts in building the Firefox 3 Microformats parser.

By mid 2007, I was thinking of winding down my involvement with Firefox; but an opportunity came along for an amazing charity event - to race an autorickshaw through the Indian & Nepalese Himalayas playing outrun with the monsoon. It was with this backdrop that MeeTimer was conceived, in order to raise awareness & donations for the charity (the Mercy Corps). MeeTimer has since moved on to become a good extension in its own right, but back then it helped raise more money than we could have alone, and I will forever cherish that.

At the time of writing, the future for Firefox extension’s seems as bright as ever. Working at the browser level really does provide so many interesting possibilities for ways to improve our online lives; and I love being a part of that.