Back in September, we brought you a really neat browser extension called Summer, which highlights and presents additional information around key people as you read the news.
Supporting more than sixty sites, including The Next Web, Summer lets you avoid having to search for noteworthy people by showing you biography snapshots down the side of the page. Until recently, however, Summer was Chrome-only, but now it has landed on Firefox too.
Summer is a really simple add-on that does exactly what it proclaims to do. And now its core features have been replicated for Mozilla’s browser, it should see a much bigger uptake too.
To see a full list of compatible sites, you can click here and scroll to the bottom, but it includes everything from the BBC and Time, to Reuters and the Guardian.
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With the add-on installed (no restart needed to activate it), you’ll see a little pop-out menu at the side, with a list of key people it has detected in the piece.
As you can see in this instance, when you click through on a name you’re first presented with an overview of who they are gleaned from Wikipedia.
And as you scroll down, you can also watch related YouTube videos and read tweets direct from their Twitter account, as well as other online data conduits.
As we noted in our previous coverage of Summer, it would be nice if the oddly-named app could also detect company names, but perhaps this would work best as a separate standalone add-on (called Spring?).
For now, however, Summer is a really useful extension that brings more meaning and context to news pieces, for easy access to background information around key individuals.
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