Labs/Personal Web Experiments

Under the focus area of "The Personal Web", Mozilla Labs seeks to aggressively prototype new ideas that offer rich personalized web experiences that put the user at the center of their web experience.

Ideas currently being prototyped

• Auto account registration - tired of filling out registration forms? Let firefox try to create accounts for you automatically.
  • As an added bonus, it'd be nice if it can be intelligent about using the right profile based on type of website.
  • And if Firefox could change my account for me automatically, it could update all my accounts when my information changes

• Password management - tired of coming up with complex passwords that you end up forgetting anyway? Let firefox make it easier for you.
  • As an added bonus, automatically rotate passwords for me.

• Auto login - firefox already auto-fills passwords for sites it knows about. Why not allow it to automatically login to these sites as well? Could be very useful especially for wikis, bugzilla etc that redirect to a separate page for login that sometimes makes the user lose context.

• One^HTwo click shopping for the whole web - allow users to optionally store their credit card info (which combined with shipping/billing address as part of a rich profile store) can simplify online shopping a great deal.

All of the above are being actively prototyped as part of the Account Manager add-on. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Identity/Account_Manager

Ideas for future prototyping

• Combine browser (Weave) login credentials with Fx master password

• Layer on 2-factor auth for logging into the browser (e.g., send an SMS with a password)

• Web notifications - lightweight api for any web app to send notifications to the user. Want to know when that Tesla ships without having to check your email every 3 minutes?

• Person object - want to know who I am and who my friends are? Use a simple JS API to ask the browser. Initial thoughts at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Sprints/People

• Build an integrated People Store for firefox, thunderbird and raindrop that gets sync'd via Weave.

• Event based sync
  • Watch for password change event to make sure you sync the new password across all your clients.

• Read/View it later - found a great video on youtube, but don't have time for it right now? Use this feature to view it later, from any device, even when you are offline.

• The me tab - visualize everything that's happening in the web that relates to you (and by extension, your social graph).

• Personalized analytics - provided detailed analytics on the user's web browsing activities, essentially a way to better visualize history + sync + account manager activities as a starting point.

• Recommendations for the web - provide a rich recommendations experience for the entire web based on the user's activity patterns as well as other filters (such as social graph, aggregate data, etc.)

• Social Firefox - a lot of social network messages are of the "look at this" variety. Could we integrate that specific message pattern with a list of friends in the browser?

• Progressive privilege escalation - Many websites require us to give them full privileges on first introduction, which is a user-hostile interaction style. How could a website earn our trust, so that we can grant access privileges to it over the course of our interaction?

• Support for TLS/SRP (or TLS/PSK?) in the browser: a phishing-proof SSL implementation, which has been roadblocked on browser support for some time

Competition/Inspiration/Collaboration

• Facebook Connect
• LinkedIn
• Read it later/Instapaper et al.
• LastPass et al.
• Amazon Recommendations Engine
• OpenID/OAuth
• Google Chrome's XMPP based browser sync
• Silent Diving Seagulls
• identengine.js
• Glue