Firefox's flexible XUL framework and sophisticated add-on system offer a rich platform for enhancing browser functionality. Mozilla Labs takes advantage of this capability as it experiments with new concepts for augmenting Web interaction. Some of the latest experiments to emerge from Mozilla Labs aim to make contacts and identity a core part of the browser.Mozilla has announced the availability of an experimental new add-on for Firefox that is designed to import information about the user's contacts from a variety of Web services and other sources. The add-on makes contact details easily accessible to the user and can also selectively supply it to remote Web applications. The initial implementation can import data from Gmail, Twitter, and the local system address book on OS X. It can optionally use the Gravatar service to find contact avatars.
After the add-on has imported and indexed the user's contact data, it becomes available to the user through an integrated contact management tool that functions like an address book. There are a number of ways that the contact information could potentially be useful in the browser itself. One of Mozilla's first experiments is an autocompletion feature that allows users to select a contact when they are typing an e-mail address into a Web form.
A number of more compelling usage scenarios involve making the user's contact information available to remote Web services. Consider, for example, the popular social networking website Foursquare, which requests access to your Gmail account so that it can connect you with your friends. Instead of giving it access to your Gmail account and all of your contacts, you could use the contacts add-on to selectively provide limited details about specific groups of contacts.
The add-on is designed in a manner which ensures that contact information is only made accessible to Web services with the user's explicit permission. In many ways, it could potentially be more secure and respectful of privacy than the existing mechanisms that are already widely used today by many social networks to automatically establish friend relationships for new users.
To make the browser's contact database accessible to Web applications, the add-on uses the W3C Contacts API specification. It's an emerging standard developed by Nokia that defines JavaScript methods for interacting with contact data. The functionality described by the standard is intended to allow Web applications to seamlessly integrate with the user's browser-integrated address book.
The API is still in the editing stage, but appears to be relatively comprehensive. It supports adding, removing, and updating items in the browser's contact database and also provides methods for searching and iterating over contacts.
The add-on also supports Plaxo's Portable Contacts standard, which is associated with the OpenSocial initiative. Mozilla says that its new contacts add-on is using the Portable Contacts format to store data internally.
Mozilla is enthusiastic about opportunities for making the new contacts add-on integrate with Raindrop, the experimental communication platform that is being developed by Mozilla Messaging. There is also a chance that we could eventually see contact synchronization support integrated in Weave. As the browser increasingly becomes the central hub of Internet communication, native support for managing and accessing contacts could be a valuable enhancement.
Source: Arstechnica.com
