Future of web browsers
Due Credit:
Mozilla Foundation
Good to be back from holiday. Happy New Year each and everyone may this new year brings joy in your life. During this vacation we have missed quite a few techno advancement news. Just before Christmas, Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg published some introductory posts on his blog about where Mozilla is headed with microformats.
According to Alex microformats will make the Web Browser into an "Information Broker" and suggests that this could happen in Firefox 3. In his own wordsÂ
future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online.
This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc.
Instead of using the entire product suite of a Google or an MSN or a Yahoo, you can instead use the particular apps you like most from not only big players - but small startups too. So say I use the 30Boxes online calendar - Firefox 3 would automatically transfer any (microformatted) events data I come across while browsing, into my 30Boxes account. And it could likewise put all my contacts into Gmail, locations into Yahoo Maps, phone numbers into Skype, etc.
As of now, there is a Firefox addon called Operator,(which I covered earlier) a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. So the seeds have started to be sowed. If Mozilla proceeds with this goal for Firefox 3 to be a broker of information, then that will significantly raise the stakes in the browser war again. Microsoft will surely follow and the smaller browsers will innovate around microformats to keep ahead. And it makes perfect sense for the web browser to do brokering, because information is so fluid and 'small pieces loosely joined' these days. There's a best of breed app for every data type - so why not use the best app where possible?
According to Alex microformats will make the Web Browser into an "Information Broker" and suggests that this could happen in Firefox 3. In his own wordsÂ
future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online.
This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc.
Instead of using the entire product suite of a Google or an MSN or a Yahoo, you can instead use the particular apps you like most from not only big players - but small startups too. So say I use the 30Boxes online calendar - Firefox 3 would automatically transfer any (microformatted) events data I come across while browsing, into my 30Boxes account. And it could likewise put all my contacts into Gmail, locations into Yahoo Maps, phone numbers into Skype, etc.
As of now, there is a Firefox addon called Operator,(which I covered earlier) a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. So the seeds have started to be sowed. If Mozilla proceeds with this goal for Firefox 3 to be a broker of information, then that will significantly raise the stakes in the browser war again. Microsoft will surely follow and the smaller browsers will innovate around microformats to keep ahead. And it makes perfect sense for the web browser to do brokering, because information is so fluid and 'small pieces loosely joined' these days. There's a best of breed app for every data type - so why not use the best app where possible?
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