At Mozilla's headquarters in Mountain View last week, we talked to Mozilla Labs manager Chris Beard and Mozilla Mobile director Jay Sullivan about their plans to put Firefox in the cloud and in your pocket. With the guidance of Beard and Sullivan, the open-source browser is extending itself beyond the desktop and taking its first tentative steps into new frontiers.

Mozilla Labs is experimenting with several emerging technologies that fill important niches in the Firefox ecosystem. Among these are the Prism site-specific browser deployment tool and Weave, a web services integration framework that lets Firefox push local data into the cloud. Weave is still in early development, but the current version already provides support for automatic web-based synchronization and storage of bookmark and history data.

Gentlemen, start your looms

The Weave initiative exists at three distinct levels: as a vision, a platform, and a product. The underlying vision is to increase user access to browser data and to bring tighter web service integration to the browser. Weave also operates as an open-ended platform that web developers and Firefox extension programmers can leverage for mashups or persistent web storage. As a product, the embodiment of Weave that is most visible to end users is the Weave browser extension; it provides a client-side implementation of some of Weave's current storage and synchronization capabilities.

Unlike some prominent web application and social networking providers, Mozilla won't snoop around in your data (it is completely encrypted client-side before being transmitted to the server for storage) or impose arbitrary constraints on how you move it in and out of the system. That is one of the ways that Mozilla is adapting its mission of user empowerment and applying it to web infrastructure.

Beard says that Mozilla Labs is actively working on an API for third-party development of Weave-based services. Some of the first pieces could be pushed out for preliminary testing and experimentation as early as this week while Mozilla is working on finding the best way to handle the full API rollout.

Mozilla has already developed internally a simple PHP library for performing basic operations on Weave data stores. The Weave server-side architecture is designed in a manner that makes it highly flexible and capable of supporting a wide range of data types. Data storage and retrieval is all handled with regular WebDAV and the Weave browser extension currently uses JSON as its default data format.

Beard also filled me in on some of the upcoming features that are under development. One of these is support for sharing content. The content sharing features are currently in the proof-of-concept stage and have some limitations, but they will very useful once support for configuring more granular sharing permissions is fully implemented.

In blog entries about the Weave initiative and related projects, Beard has talked about how to build a richer Firefox user experience by connecting the user to the space between the browser, the desktop, and the Internet. Moving the user's information into the Internet cloud in a manner that is conducive to secure sharing, repurposing, and remote access is an important building block in Mozilla's efforts to achieve that goal.

Going mobile

Another initiative that shares some common ground with Weave is the Mozilla Mobile project, which broadly aims to bring the Firefox web browser to PDAs, mobile phones, and other handheld devices. When Mozilla first announced its mobile initiative, we expressed skepticism and noted that competitors like Opera and WebKit appear better suited for environments with constrained system resources. Significant improvements in memory usage and performance have recently decreased Firefox's footprint and have made it a serious contender in the mobile space.

So how does the Mozilla Mobile initiative relate to Weave? The ability to shift browser metadata and state information onto the web will eventually make it possible for users to transition seamlessly between desktop and mobile Firefox instances. There is much more to this process than mere synchronization, and a big part of the challenge will be finding ways to bring the user's personalized Firefox experience to a multitude of form factors and have it translate over in a way that is intuitive for users.

Sullivan tells us that Mozilla is looking at ways to facilitate that level of integration and also offer a real web experience in mobile contexts without having to compromise the user's privacy or distort and reformat content. Mozilla also wants to work on user interface innovation to increase the usability of mobile browsing. The mobile project is still at a very early stage of development and much work remains before it will be ready for widespread use, but preliminary mobile UI prototypes are already available for testing.

Mozilla's ongoing research and experimentation with new kinds of browser technologies provides some valuable insight into the future of web browsing and the Internet user experience. Although the implementations are far from complete, Weave and Mozilla Mobile look like ideas with a lot to offer to both users and developers.