Mozilla knows in this day and age that nearly everyone connects socially on websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. With that type of user-base, Mozilla has plans to expand its Firefox browser with a new social API that attempts to better connect social networking with the browser. As if we didn’t interact with social networks enough, Mozilla is already testing the social API.
Mozilla’s goal is to bring features of all popular social networking platforms and add them to Firefox. Essentially, when you receive a push notification or chat message, Firefox will alert you. The best part of the whole process is that you would only need to log-in once, rather than logging-in every time you open the web-browser.
Here’s how it would work: you will be presented with a log-in panel to sign-in to social networks you are active on. Once logged in, Firefox will load ‘several pages’ from the social network for your viewing. They aren’t open in an actual browser, but they act the same, and even log cookies.
One concern over the whole situation is privacy — and if Mozilla is being sent any data viewed through the browser. Tom Lowenthal, of the privacy and public policy team on Mozilla’s Privacy Blog stated his ideas on how the browser may include better privacy than the social network itself:
If we put this functionality in Firefox instead, you can still interact with your social network and share pages, but without the potential tracking by the social networks. It also allows you to share pages even if that page doesn’t include social sharing widgets. The recommend button in the URL bar — for Facebook, it’s a Like button — only sends the page’s URL to your social network when you click on it.
The announcement of this social API comes just shortly upon the premier of the Firefox Marketplace last week. We aren’t sure when Mozilla plans to lauch a beta-version of the API, but we’ll keep our eyes pealed.
Source: ZDNet
[ttjad]
