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Mozilla Labs To Bring Address Book To Firefox
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."
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.
First of all, when I'm filling out a web form I'm *never* putting somebody else's information into it -- it's always my own. Second of all... actually, there is no second of all. When I'm using Firefox for email, it's just my front-end to GMail or other webmail which already has an address book. I'm not a big fan of the "well, I don't see a need therefore nobody should" school of thought; so I'd love to hear about use cases where this functionality is actually meeting some need not already handled more appropriately elsewhere.
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.
The cake is a pie