Mozilla Determined To Make Internet Future Completely Firefox-Centered

It was only yesterday that we discussed Mozilla’s idea to crowdsource definition of the future of the web, internet browser in particular, by calling for concepts of what internet users want the perfect browser of the future to be. Now it seems that Mozilla already has some plans of their own - and these plans seem to include Firefox domination in every possible field.

Mozilla has announced plans to develop Snowl, a Firefox extension that is intended to combine all your consumption of information from all the possible sources to one place - to your browser (Firefox obviously). For now Mozilla has offered us what seems to be a very early prototype for discussion to make sure this is what we really want to use.

What the guys over at Mozilla Labs have in mind is a tool that will combine all the processes of messaging right within the browser. At that “messaging” has a very broad definition here: messages include traditional emails, feeds, posts from forums or social networks that we belong to. This sounds like too huge number of sources to me and probably to them as well so for the initial prototype they have only chosen two sources: RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter.

But unfortunately I myself don’t see any “messaging” here for now. What I see is a new tool to consume information. But messaging means discussion while the initial prototype of Snowl does not even include any interface to reply to the messages received? This interface can be added if we show enough interest but what we have now can hardly be described as a messaging solution.

The thing that sounds quite unusual about this project to me is that it is intended to have different modes of consumption for those messages that are of the highest importance as contrasted to those that can be scanned quickly without facing danger of missing something vital. This is determined by where the messages originate from and to highlight this distinction Snowl offers two vies: a traditional list view

and a “river of news” view that reminds me of the latest addition in the search field - Cuil with its newspaper-style layout for result pages:

But no matter what they define the new project to be, a bigger problem I see here is that the world faces danger of becoming too Firefox-centered. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I personally don’t really want my browser to become a substitute for my operating system. Sure, Firefox is an almost perfect browser and I have quite a number of add-ons installed that boost my productivity to a certain extent. But adding more and more of them will eventually damage the memory consumption and that’s not I expect many users will want to experience. At that Snowl definitely sounds like too heavy add-on even now.

But knowing how many fans the guys over at Mozilla Labs have I am sure they will receive enough support to pursue the development of Snowl and eventually reach the condition where it can become a universal messaging solution within the browser that they promise it to become. For those fans that can’t live without doing absolutely everything within Firefox the prototype of Snowl is already available for download and testing - if you are not afraid of multiple bugs they warn us about, go ahead and try it.

But let’s just keep in mind that our time is not actually wasted by switching between various applications on your desktop, it is wasted because of the nature of multi-tasking and having to get attention from one thing to another and then back to the initial task. Switching between tabs in a browser is not very much different from switching between applications on your desktop so even if someone pushes all my messages from all sources into my browser, it will hardly save much time for me - chances are is that instead it will make my head spin.