FoxyTunes

» see foxytunes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

foxytunes sat in the firefox toolbar between adblock and your search bar. it was a few pixels tall. play, pause, prev, next, plus the song title scrolling across the strip. it talked to thirty-plus desktop media players via their respective control apis, so you could pause winamp or itunes without alt-tabbing.

alex sirota started building it as a graduate-student side project in 2004 and released it free with a donate button. by 2005 the project was a company, co-founded with his brother vitaly. firefox extension culture in 2004 to 2007 was still small, and a competent media-player remote was useful to the kind of person who lived in browser tabs all day.

i was on firefox 1.x and 2.x in those years, in ankara on ttnet adsl, doing the standard engineering-student thing of three browser windows open with winamp 5 running on the side. foxytunes did show up on tr forum signatures of the period. i did not install it. the alt-tab to winamp was a single muscle motion and the toolbar real estate was already going to other extensions.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the trick was that the api glue worked. winamp had a documented control surface, itunes had one on windows via com, foobar2000 exposed one too. foxytunes shipped the integrations as a single extension so you did not have to find five separate winamp toolbars. it also worked across browsers eventually, supporting internet explorer, seamonkey, thunderbird, and the late-2000s flock browser. the eight-million-downloads-by-2008 number is what put it on yahoo's radar.

yahoo bought foxytunes on 4 february 2008. press accounts put the number above thirty million dollars, which was a real price for a toolbar extension. the assumption inside yahoo was that the firefox audience overlapped with the launchcast and yahoo music engine audience, and that foxytunes could become a default surface for whatever yahoo's next music strategy turned out to be.

~ the day it died ~

yahoo's next music strategy did not arrive. launchcast was already on its way out (radio service killed september 2009). yahoo music unlimited had been folded into rhapsody in 2008. the music engine itself stopped getting updates. foxytunes shipped a few releases under yahoo and then went quiet.

marissa mayer took over yahoo in july 2012 and began the cleanup. round three of the cleanup arrived on 28 june 2013 with a press release listing twelve killed products. altavista was on the list. axis was on the list. foxytunes was on the list. the formal shutdown date was 1 july 2013, three days later.

~ what survived ~

the music player remote category never came back as a browser extension because the music player itself moved into the browser tab. by 2013 you were on grooveshark or spotify web or youtube, and the play-pause keys on your laptop talked to a tab via media session api. foxytunes solved a problem that stopped existing. it is a clean fossil of the 2004 to 2010 firefox extension era and of yahoo's habit of buying clever small things for big sums and then forgetting why.

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