If you’ve been lucky enough to get a Google Wave invite you’ll know that while the service shows promise it’s currently painfully slow if you’re running anything other than a powerhouse of a computer.
Even opening a wave can take a few seconds. It’s highly frustrating and means that, for the time being, you probably won’t be keeping Wave opening in a browser tab all the time. The downside here is that you have to keep logging into Wave to check for new messages.
Stepping into save Wave users from this pain is a new Firefox Add-on. The Google Wave Notifier from Chad Smith installs in seconds and sits at the bottom of your browser displaying the number of waves that have updated since your last visit.
Once you’ve entered your login details you can set how often is checks your Wave account for updates. The default is every two hours so you might want to increase that if you’re a heavy user.
As a first release it’s still quite buggy but many Wave users will be glad to have something that means loading up Wave is only something they do when absolutely necessary.
Martin Bryant is based in Manchester, UK. A co-founder of the city's monthly Social Media Cafe events and award-winning blogger, he is Digital Content Editor for Marketing Manchester. His main interests are developments in the social web that relate to the mobile and music industries. Twitter, Personal site
