Mozilla Labs To Bring Address Book To Firefox 80
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Mozilla has announced the availability of an experimental new add-on for Firefox that is designed to import information about the user's contacts from a variety of Web services and other sources. The add-on makes contact details easily accessible to the user and can also selectively supply it to remote Web applications. ... After the add-on has imported and indexed the user's contact data, it becomes available to the user through an integrated contact management tool that functions like an address book. One of Mozilla's first experiments is an autocompletion feature that allows users to select a contact when they are typing an e-mail address into a Web form. ... To make the browser's contact database accessible to Web applications, the add-on uses the W3C Contacts API specification."
Danger... keep that door locked. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason why we don't keep address books in openly-readable unencrypted XML files.
Mix an easily-read address book with a small bit of untrusted code, and you've got a worm with the capability of sending victim-specific e-mail. Upload that list to a server, and you've just given your favorite people the gift of spam. Microsoft learned this the hard way when most users were using Outlook Express and Windows Address Book and both of them had wide-open for scripting interfaces, so that lead to a mess. We don't use those things anymore.
Please... let's make sure this requires a stored-password check so that we're sure only apps the user trusts to read the address book. All of the cool web apps are doing it.
Re:Danger... keep that door locked. (Score:3, Insightful)
Seamonkey (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems you would be using Seamonkey instead of FIrefox if this sort of all-in-one approach was appealing to you. I don't see the point.
Re:Danger... keep that door locked. (Score:3, Insightful)
As evidenced by Facebook, Joe Sixpack doesn't give a damn about privacy.
History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Why on Earth are they trying to turn Firefox into the Mozilla Application Suite!? There's a reason that failed, and Firefox, originally just an afterthought to quiet those complaining about Mozilla's bloat, won out.
What is wrong with "do one thing and do it well?"
In any case, I look forward to the next project, which spins off a browser from the Firefox project for people who just want a browser.
Re:Danger... keep that door locked. (Score:1, Insightful)
As evidenced by Facebook, Joe Sixpack doesn't give a damn about privacy.
I think that's only because Joe Sixpack has never taken a hard look at datamining techniques, the relative ease with which they can be implemented, and how this information can be misused. "I don't care about privacy at all" is like many other positions; it does not typically fare well among educated users who are equipped to make a factual cost-benefit analysis.
True. But educated users who take a hard look at datamining techniques in order to make factual cost-benefit analysis of their daily activities are not, by definition, Joe Sixpack.