Picking up where you left off

Last week, Chris Beard kicked off what will be a valuable discussion about how we could leverage the capabilities of the network itself to “…further enhance the user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.”

There are lots of areas to dig into, but as a starting point, I’ve been thinking about how we can improve the personalization of the Firefox experience by taking advantage of an online platform component, and specifically, how we can make the personalized experience portable.

Firefox makes it easy for people to customize their browser interface to suit their unique individual needs. And Firefox itself accumulates information through its use like history, bookmarks and form-fill data that makes the interface even more useful and personal. Most of us have experienced this first hand. Have you ever sat down at someone else’s computer or used a fresh install of a browser?

Because Firefox stores this information locally, as soon as you step away from the PC where that information has accumulated, you’ve lost your window on the Web.  Sit down at another computer and you’re back to a generic experience.  Try to use the Web from your mobile phone, and you need to do a lot of work just to find the information you’ve already found at your desktop.You can’t just pick up where you left off.

The number of people using multiple computers to access the Web is growing.  Use of shared computers in schools, cyber-cafes, libraries, and at home is expanding.  And while it’s still small in absolute terms, mobile use of the Web is finally becoming a reality.  Because of this evolution in our use of the Web, picking up where you leave off will become more and more important.

There are point solutions to pieces of the puzzle, such as browser synchronization utilities.  But making the personal experience portable is about much more than sync.

Moving browser metadata into the cloud, putting APIs, encryption and access control around it, and giving the user control of its disclosure and transparency into its uses could enable new user experiences that are appropriate to the human activity the user is engaged in, and the device being used, not merely synchronized images of a Firefox desktop experience.

Here are just a few of the things I’d like to be able to do in this area that may be facilitated by an online component:

• I want access to my personalized view into the Web on any PC, mobile phone or handheld computer.
• I’d like to be able to walk away from my PC, pick up my phone and head out, and then by using something like the Firefox 3 Location Bar, tap just a few keys to pick up my browsing where I left off.
• When I’m out and about, and encounter (in conversation, on a billboard, on the radio, etc.) something that I would like to learn more about when I have the time and a bigger screen, I’d like to be able to capture that interest easily through my mobile phone and have it queued up for reading/research later.

Making the personal user experience portable is just one of many results that could result from introducing an online services component to the Mozilla platform; and this post just scratches the surface on how that personalization could work

What ideas do you have?  Come join us at the Mozilla Labs forum and help us figure out what we could do.

Tags: labs, mozilla