Mozilla plans to include a web page screenshot sharing feature to Firefox as part of the Test Pilot program, a spokesperson has confirmed to Softpedia.

The new feature is called Page Shot and will initially roll out on Firefox Test Pilot in late-Q3 of this year.

The Firefox Test Pilot program allows users to test experimental Firefox features using a special add-on. Based on user feedback, those features will end up as built-in Firefox features, or self-standing add-ons.

Quick intro to Firefox Page Shot

The first version of Page Shot will provide users with an easy way to select an area of the page using drag&drop gestures, and save the image to a Mozilla-hosted backend. In the early alpha version Softpedia tested, images are automatically deleted after 14 days.

Controls are provided to share each screenshot on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or via email.

The pageshot.net website where we tested the alpha version is now offline, as Mozilla prepares to launch the add-on via Test Pilot.

Softpedia spoke with Ian Bicking, Engineering Manager for Firefox, who was kind enough to provide more details about how the project evolved since April 2015, when he first blogged about it.

Softpedia: Tells us about Page Shot.

Ian Bicking: Page Shot is a Firefox Test Pilot experiment exploring new ways for users to save and share their personalized experience of the web. In our first release, we are giving users a simple hosted screenshot tool with some smart search features baked in.

In future releases, we want to give users powerful new archiving tools to let them recover and share their important content even as websites themselves evolve and change.

Softpedia: Why develop a Mozilla-sanctioned page screenshot utility?

Ian Bicking: The Firefox team has spent a good deal of time researching how our users complete complex tasks on the web. Page Shot, along with projects like Activity Stream, Context Graph, and Tofino, is an experimental feature developed in response to this ongoing research.

Simply put, we want to know how our users will make use of features like Page Shot, and if it makes sense as a native feature in the browser. To this end, we’re focusing on not only screenshotting, but search and recovery of saved content in general.

For example, Page Shot has some really cool search features that will allow users to find their screenshots by searching for what’s in them and where they are from. Future iterations of Page Shot will include more robust archiving features as well.

Selecting an area of the page with Page Shot

Softpedia: What's Page Shot's origin story?

Ian Bicking: We think a lot about sharing, linking and saving information on the web. We’ve done a number of experiments around annotation and live collaboration, and thought a lot about the question: "If I send you something, how can I be sure you'll see what I wanted to show you?"

Normally, we send URLs around, but the content at URLs changes, it may be personalized, and the thing that I want to show you might just be a tidbit from a long article. The full page is useful context but when you open the URL that I shared, the first thing you may see is someone else's teaser headline, which may not be the thing that I wanted to share.

So how do we refer to things on the web, when the web is constantly changing, and often hostile to direct references? URLs work great for some things, but not others, and as a web user, you have to have a very sophisticated knowledge of how the web is put together to figure out what might happen when you share a URL.

Of course, these problems are familiar to a lot of people, and screenshots are the answer that a lot of people use. There's a lot of great screenshotting tools out there, but for Page Shot, a screenshot is a means to an end: the screenshot is one very familiar way to save a moment in time, and an exact piece of content from the web.

As we roll out new features or experiments around Page Shot we want to keep asking that question: how can we enable people to remember and share things about their own experiences on the web? And can we make those memories and notes part of the web?

The Page Shot dashboard