Mozilla wants to weave Firefox with your desktop

December 22, 2007 |

Mozilla wants to weave Firefox with your desktop

By John Pospisil

Mozilla wants to weave Firefox with your desktop Mozilla has announced a new project to formally explore the integration of its Firefox web browser with the computer desktop.

“We believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information,” said Mozilla.

“We’re now launching a new project within Mozilla Labs to formally explore this integration. This project will be known as Weave and it will focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.”

Mozilla has committed to keeping Weave as open as possible, and says it wants to build an “open extensible framework for services integration”. The company has provided an overview of its organizing principles. It says it will:

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

Mozilla is already offering a basic framework and server-side testing and experimentation, authentication, bookmark and history synchronization, and default encryption of all user data with a placeholder algorithm.

In early 2008, the company expects that it will be able to offer initial Web service APIs for developers to build on, user controls and ability to delegate (and revoke) access rights to specific bits of browser metadata, and UI to enable sharing on applicable interfaces.

With the ability to access your Firefox settings from anywhere, it’s obvious that Mozilla is aiming to become the central hub of your online life with this new addition.