Cooliris- a cool new visually enhancing add on for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

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.

One of the most impressive things about this add on is the scroll of images that it presents you with. It looks like an endless wall that you can continue to scroll through until you find the image/video you want, this will then be enlarged in the middle of the page. 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. Although this may not seem particularly useful at first, once you begin to play around with the features including the add-on really begins to shine.

There are hundrends of compatible sites, I would think most people would use featured sites such as Google image search or YouTube but other sites like Facebook and Myspace are also compatible. 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. When searching through image files stored on your PC, Cooliris can be used and looks impressive. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about video files, Cooliris is not compatible with these 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. While not an essential download or particularly revolutionary Cooliris is certainly worth the 2.9mb download to enhance your image/video browsing or even to get a bit of shopping done.


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Chris Holgate writes a weekly article of all things tech related. He is a director and copyrighter of the online computer consumables business Refresh Cartridges who sell cheap ink cartridges, toner cartridges, computer hardware and other computer consumables online.