Browser Services for the Web
Shane Caraveo, Mozilla

"We advance the vision of you owning your own experience and data, 
attached to your identity, with whatever services you choose integrate." 
- Brendan Eich

The web today reflects a series of attempts at integrating services 
across websites, all of which have been more or less problematic. You 
can see examples of this in the "nascar" of share buttons, limited 
authentication services, embedded commenting systems and more. Given the 
current capabilities, websites include these services based on brand and 
user adoption. While that is not bad in and of itself, it it limits 
users choice to one of a very small number of dominant providers, as 
well as presenting potential privacy and security implications for the 
general public.

While there are many great attempts at providing architectures to 
address some of these issues, ultimately the problem boils down to 
understanding the preferences of each individual user. Imagine you are a 
big fan of ACME, a social networking and identity service. Imagine a web 
where everywhere you went, all websites could easily provide social and 
identity services you preferred, without each website having to know 
about ACME or integrate with ACME directly. If your browser worked in 
conjunction with websites, they could tailor your experience to your needs.

At Mozilla we believe the User Agent has a key role to play in 
establishing that understanding. Your devices have all the data 
necessary to build an understanding of your preferences. Our Social API 
functionality is a small step towards this kind of browser-service 
integration in Firefox, offering deeper integration for websites with 
the browser. I wont claim to have achieved any of the ideals expressed 
so far, but I believe there is a clear path in that direction.

Social API is built around the concept of using the web to extend the 
functionality of the browser. We offer a very thin API where currently 
necessary, but remain focused on using current standards or current 
state of the art methods to provide this integration. While we control 
the boundaries within the browser and between the browser and websites, 
websites using the Social API retain control over their user experience, 
features and branding.

We are not currently not pursuing standards around Social API as we feel 
there is still much to discover before we could approach that stage. We 
do, however, wish to engage the community as much as possible.

Find out more about Social API at:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Social_API
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/06/27/social-api-for-all/