Mozilla said the new project, called The Coop, aimed to build a browser that let people more easily share web content and web links among friends and colleagues.
The Mozilla Labs web site says the only surprising thing about the burgeoning market for Web 2.0 style social networking sites has been that little of the functionality is built into the browser.
“The result is that when people think of tools for social interaction, email and instant messenger are at the top of their list, not web browsers,” the Mozilla Labs website says.
The Coop is a Firefox addon in development that will let users keep track of what their friends are doing online, and share new and interesting content with one or more of those friends. It will integrate with popular web services, using their existing data feeds as a transport mechanism.
“Enter The Coop, a Mozilla Labs project to experiment with adding social tools to the web browser. We want to create a fun and easy way to share links with your friends, and to browse the set of links that friends have shared with you,” it said.
“We also want to make it easy to ‘subscribe’ to a friend in order to make it easy to keep track of the pictures, movies, blog posts and status information that they might be posting on a variety of services.”
An early working prototype of The Coop is available for download through Mozilla Labs.
Mozilla believes that people sharing news and files was the killer application at the birth of the web and remains the killer application today – and that while different services had been introduced to allow that sharing to occur more easily, it make sense to build the functions into the browser.
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