Mozilla Wants to Put Social Networks in the Browser
Found on Webmonkey on Saturday, 13 October 2012
Firefox 17 introduces the first bit of Mozilla’s plan to bring the social web into the web browser. Firefox 17 lays the groundwork for Mozilla’s new Social API. There’s nothing to see right now, but under the hood Firefox 17 is getting ready to move your social web interactions from individual websites into a sidebar within Firefox.
If social network integration isn’t your bag, fear not, Firefox does have a few changes aimed at web developers, most notably the new Markup Panel in the developer tools.
Reminds me of a browser which existed before Firefox: Netscape. The developers successfully stuffed so many extras into the browser that it turned into a big piece of bloated junk and vanished. Looks like Mozilla has not learned much from all this: it should release a minimal Firefox which only contains the most basic functionality needed to display a website (and not even Javascript). Everything else has to be provided as a plugin.