Mozilla’s Chris Beard on the Future of Firefox and Online Services
Mozilla wants Firefox to get in on the social web. First came The Coop, which remains an active project, and now Chris Beard, VP and General Manager for Mozilla Labs, says that Mozilla is looking to develop an open, extensible framework for online services.
Beard says that the goal of the framework would be allowing users to access web services and social sites and sync data between their web browser, web aggregator or web-enabled desktop application.
So far the project appears to be just an idea, though there was a website briefly available at services.mozilla.com (the site was removed and currently the page reads: “new account registrations have been temporarily disabled”). As for what Mozilla’s take on an open service framework might look like, Beard outlines a few guiding principles.
- provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
- ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
- provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
- respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
- leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
- build a extensible architecture like Firefox
Essentially Mozilla wants to give Firefox (or any other browser) a common set of frameworks for accessing web services. For any services involved it offers a way to standardize the user experience and it makes a certain degree of sense to let browsers, and browser-like apps, handle these tasks. After all, protocols, encryption and identity management are already a big part of what we do with our browsers — the added sauce here is data synchronization.
The main problem with this plan seems to be getting sites to adopt it. You can pretty much count Facebook out given its track record with any attempt to let you control your data, and to a certain extent Google is already active in this space with projects like Gears and might not feel the need to implement a whole new framework for its services.
Still, were this to see the light of day, it could be popular with emerging and smaller services since it would provide a way to quickly and easily implement things like messaging, photo uploading, identity and more. And of course some of the small emerging sites of today will replace Facebook before too long.
Of course every time Mozilla suggests doing anything with Firefox a chorus of commenters pop up to suggest, politely of course, that perhaps focusing on the core functionality of the browser might be a better idea. I tend to agree, but to be fair, that isn’t really the function of Mozilla Labs, that’s the Firefox team’s job. Labs was designed to encourage exactly the sort of experimentation that Beard is suggesting here and while it may never see the light of day, it’s always possible that this could be the thing that redefines how you use the web just like Firebird did back in 2003.
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