04.05.07
Firefox 3.0 Previews; More Than a Browser?
In the past several weeks more and more details are coming to light about the next version of Firefox, the main browser competition to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Excitement is growing for two very seperate audiences:
First, development guru’s are jonzing about the possibilities of local client storage. While this is possible with runtime environments like the newly released Adobe Apollo, Firefox 3 promises to not require a seperate download and installation. How they decide to sandbox each application running in a browser window – that is, protect it from doing harm to the user’s file system, will be very interesting.
The thing that had made headlines yesterday, however, is a portion of the app called Coop. As Stan Schroeder describes it:
Users will be able to add friends directly in Firefox, and send them notes, images and web pages. The idea behind Coop is to move the popular practice of sending fun web pages via e-mail directly to the browser, but it’s obvious that Coop could become more than this…
Personally, I love little innovations like this – abstracting redundant functionality that’s normally implemented on a site-by-site basis and putting it into the browser. A prime example of this innovation already in Firefox 2.0 is their spell check. Why have every website try and implement their own version of this utility? It’s certainly not unique to a website. And by pulling it back into the browser level a user can now do much more useful things – like adding their own vocabulary that may not exist in a generic dictionary – and have it be available to any site they browse.
Coop promises to do this with social networks too. Why recreate the same social networks over and over again when what you really want to do is have them available at all times? Why build your posse in a closed system to talk about the wider web when you could just take them with you as you explore? Schroeder comes to the conclusion that Flock (the struggling social browser) may be in trouble with these developments. I would be looking more at sites like MySpace.com, Bebo.com, or even Twitter and ask myself how these siloed social networks will compete in an community environment that will become website agnostic.