Just when you thought Firefox couldn't get any better, along comes the back to school version of the browser - Firefox on multimedia steroids, as it were.

The premise of Firefox Campus

Slowly but surely, Firefox is making headway into the Internet Explorer user base, and thanks be to the browser gods for that. And what better way to drive home your advantage for the long term than woo the students of today, so they become the evangelic users of tomorrow. It isn't exactly rocket science marketing. iTunes, the software engine behind the iPod was a student driven phenomenon, and look where that got Apple today, so the same approach could work with Firefox Campus, right? Maybe. Maybe not.

Foxytunes

Do you listen to Music while surfing the Web? FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser.

Maybe they should re-word that from the teachers' point of view?

Instead of finding quotations, illustrations and graphs, news footage, biographical data and the like, invest your astronomical fees developing a 360 degreee overview of Britney Spears . That should help your job prospects by course end, no end, not.

StumbleUpon

The second element of the Campus Edition is an account with StumbleUpon.

Connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

Oh, that sounds like a good one for all serious academics! But for attention deficit youths of today, shouldn't that say,

Instead of interacting face-to-face, you can chit chat about the game with your neighbor over the internet; compare in-dorm gossip, and most importantly, share the URLs of essays and presentations you found to plagiarise.

The Firefox Campus edition is no Trojan horse.

There is already a skeptical feeling in teacher land that the internet is not that great a learning tool in most hands. These two lame add-ons look like yet another type of trivia-oriented Google- and Wiki-based research that is replacing good old reading and assessing and thumbing through multiple opinions. Firefox Campus is shallow and won't allay any teachers' fears about the dumbing down impact of the internet in education.

If IT people want a place in education, they need to be aware of the negatives of the right tool in the wrong hands and realise that there is a good reason behind the reversal of some laptops for kids programs. The internet and the use of technology aint that great, yet. I am not saying studying cannot be fun, and there is a place for computer stuff, but the art of learning is a serious business best left to teachers to supervise. This idea of encouraging students to flirt alone between music, Stumbled sites and study is way off base, in my opinion.

Mozilla, find these academic students some academic value in the browser, don't add to the mindless distractions.

I'm back to my Britney thesis now, which is OK, because I have finished studying for today.