
Features Firefox should implement to weaken Facebook's stranglehold of the web - forteller
http://blogg.forteller.net/2013/first-steps/
======
tehwalrus
I'd love it if this sort of thing worked. I see a few problems:

1) _All_ the people are on facebook. Only a % use firefox (as opposed to
chrome, and all the others,) so this doesn't actually mirror your existing
friend network, let alone solve the problem of making it easier (which is the
only way people will actually switch.)

2) Facebook and google chat already have a list of your friends/contacts right
there to hand. Firefox would need to gather this data somehow, which would
either be intrusive (think LinkedIn "import your gmail contacts") or annoying
(I am _not_ going to mess around exporting things manually, and neither will
the real humans).

3) Existing network implementations. As per Adam Lerymenko's "Redecentralize"
talk[1], all the existing services are based on centralised network
architectures. Unless Mozilla build their own central network of contacts etc,
we'll be stuck using the existing monolithic sites that don't respect privacy
as backends. Which (as per the Talkilla example) isn't the point. If Zero tier
one et al are successful one day, then maybe we'll all be own our own separate
VPNs with our friends (although that doesn't mirror the global social graph
either.)

[1] [http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/07/30/02-adam-
zero...](http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/07/30/02-adam-
zerotierone.html)

~~~
e12e
Regarding 3) Mozilla already runs free sync servers, it wouldn't be much of a
stretch to allow syncing of contacts (In fact, extending Mozilla sync
api/service to support Thunderbird might be a good idea...?).

Other alternatives are syncing contacts via IMAP or LDAP -- although I'm not
entirely sold on either of those...

As for "liberating" your contacts from Facebook/Google/Etc -- your browser
might actually have an advantage -- everyone that uses these sites, already
trusts their browser with the login information. That's not much of a stretch
to implement some wrappers around the various apis to get a "local" (in
browser profile) copy of the list(s).

Firefox (or Iceweasel) already manages many of my passwords, I'd have no
problem syncing my contacts with Firefox too (although I currently don't see
much of a need for it. Might make a good addon either way -- makes using
disconnected webmail services even easier if Firefox has my address list...).

~~~
tehwalrus
re: saving passwords in a browser: oh yeah, people still do that. I haven't
for years. I leave a few auth cookies around, true, but not for sensitive
sites.

~~~
e12e
Why not? Anything particularly bad with how Mozilla encrypts and stores
passwords (when a suitable pass-phrase is chosen)?

Unless you're using some form of one-time token, a compromised browser process
could still expose your passwords (not to mention that it of course have
access to whatever data you protect with that password (emails, documents
etc)).

~~~
tehwalrus
Does firefox actually encrypt them and require a master password to open them
up? Times have clearly moved on... Back in the day, it (or whichever browser I
was using in 2009) used to just autofill the passwords for the site, I assumed
they were just encoded somewhere, not encrypted.

I use a mixture of things I've been meaning to consolidate for a while... all
of which are a big list of unique (obviously) passwords stored somewhere
encrypted by a long password.

~~~
fernandotakai
This is a good (albeit old-ish) article on extracting passwords of firefox,
chrome and IE [http://raidersec.blogspot.com.br/2013/06/how-browsers-
store-...](http://raidersec.blogspot.com.br/2013/06/how-browsers-store-your-
passwords-and.html)

------
vaadu
Shoving more bloated code into my browser is hardly a good thing. Firefox
needs to stay focused on 4 things: speed, security, standards, stability

Chrome has done this and thrived. I still use Firefox for the extensions and
the fact that Google can not be trusted.

~~~
tuxracer
People are forgetting Firefox's roots. Mozilla's original browser included an
XMPP IM client, IRC client, email client, and (oh yeah) browser. It was a slow
bloated mess. The whole point of Firefox was to be a lean single-purpose app
and let add-ons fill other needs on a case-by-case basis. People like the
author of this article are basically asking Firefox to coalesce back into what
it was split off from in the first place.

~~~
emn13
Do you believe the old mozilla suite had more code than FF does today?

Complexity isn't easy, but it's not that black and white. Just because the
first time round it didn't work out so well doesn't mean it won't this time;
especially since the circumstances are so very different.

In any case, things like personas are supported, but most of the complexity
isn't in the browser; new functionality doesn't need to be tightly coupled to
the browser - just exposed.

I actually think the problem isn't so much on the software side, it's
organizational: trying to do too many things at once means making sacrifices.

------
forteller
Sorry about my server going down! You can read a mirror over on WordPress.com:
[http://forteller.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/mirror-first-
steps...](http://forteller.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/mirror-first-steps-to-
weaken-facebook-and-take-back-the-web/)

------
pjbrunet
If you want to weaken Facebook, here's an idea. Get a dot-com and put it on a
business card with your email address and/or phone number. When you meet
people, give them that card. That's what I do. I keep them in my wallet. So
much easier (less awkward) than exchanging phone numbers. I'm not even that
extroverted and I'm surprised how many cards I give out. I always get a
positive reaction to the card and never once had someone look at the card and
say anything about Facebook. It's also revealing to see how different people
react to the card. If more people did this, I think it would cut Facebook out
of more social interactions.

~~~
forteller
Yes, that's a good thing. But it's only one tiny piece of the puzzle. It's
like saying "if you want to tackle climate change don't try to lobby the
government for stricter regulations or for a price on carbon, just recycle
your trash". This is such a huge problem that we need both tiny, personal
initiatives, and systemic change. We can put all our eggs in either one.

~~~
pjbrunet
I agree it's a tiny thing, but I think that first exchange has untapped
potential. I like what Moo is doing, for example.

------
yukkurishite
Not only are there plenty of applications that already do this, you could also
develop a firefox plugin for it. Why on Earth would you want it in the browser
core?

~~~
forteller
Well, as I say in the blog post: «I’m sure there are some extensions out there
doing all this already. But that’s just not good enough. It needs to be built
into the browser to make it easy and visible enough.»

What do I mean not visible enough? For people to use it, they need to know
about it. Most people don't even know they can use extensions (or even what a
browser is), but they do know that Facebook has a chat function, because it's
right there.

Remember, this is not about making life easier for geeks like us. It's about
making it just as seamless to use Open web technologies/social networks for
normal people as it is to use closed/private systems like Facebook.

~~~
yukkurishite
But what added value would there be in implementing it in firefox core? What
do you mean by "easy and visible enough"?

~~~
sshannon
Maybe you should re-read the article which explains with words and diagrams
what "easy and visible enough" means.

The point of adding it to core is also argued in the article, which proposes
an alternative to the monopoly Facebook and Google are currently obtaining.

Forteller already addressed both these questions!

------
darklajid
I like both ideas, a lot. I'm a heavy FF user (usually > 100 tabs open,
heavily customized, running Aurora) but never used these live updates. I
didn't even know that they exist.

A decent (stable, open) xmpp client somewhere in my FF session would be much
appreciated, given that GTalk's going away/moving to Hangouts and I'm
migrating to my self-hosted XMPP server.

~~~
mfincham
What does an XMPP client built in to FF give you that a normal stand-alone
XMPP client wouldn't?

~~~
forteller
It gives you a huge network/user base who would never install a stand-alone
client, but who let Facebook lock them in to their chat system because it's
dead simple.

Remember, this is not about making life easier for geeks like us, people who
actually know what XMPP is. It's about making it just as seamless to use Open
web technologies/social networks for normal people as it is to use
closed/private systems like Facebook.

~~~
nodata
Firefox was founded to replace bloated Mozilla. Adding a chat client won't
help.

~~~
anon1385
Mozilla got bloated because the creators wanted users to live their entire
computing lives inside a single application. The reasons for wanting that are
always the same: it gives the creator the most power.

Of course this time around there is a slight difference; rather than adding a
chat client to the browser they will prefer to keep adding features to the
browser until somebody can write a chat client inside it. Either way the
original criticism still stands, which is that doing everything in a single
application means duplicating a lot of the work of the host OS, but generally
not as well (from window management to scheduling threads to reclaiming memory
to supporting hardware features like parallel computation to managing files).

The current plan at Mozilla seems to be for Firefox to be an OS that people
use for everything, not just one of many applications that people use. This
would give them a great deal of power. The power to kill services or
applications that they don't like (e.g. Facebook), the power to prevent
application developers supporting hardware they don't like (e.g kinect) and so
on. More so than the traditional desktop OSs which have been open in allowing
anybody to write software that talks directly to the hardware: browsers are
sandboxes that prevent hardware access.

Note: none of this means I like Facebook. I refuse to use it. However I don't
think Mozilla should be killing things on their platform just because they
don't like them, especially when they are trying to set themselves up as an OS
provider.

~~~
abus
Too late, Chrome OS and Android.

------
pfraze
There's a weird parallel to having browsers implement applications and having
governments handle business needs. There's only one upstream, and it can
destroy the downstream whether it works or not. You gotta be really selective
about what you implement there.

It's more important that FF enable downstream to make applications which can
then compete with Facebook and break the silos model, which I think is
happening with WebRTC.

------
hynahmwxsbyb
What stranglehold? Does anyone really use Facebook anymore?

~~~
blisterpeanuts
It's not that easy to avoid Facebook. Many sites are switching to FB social
plugin for talkbacks. I've stopped posting comments and questions on many news
sites after they started requiring a Facebook identity. Or else I open an
incognito window, use my alternative Facebook identity created just for
talkbacks, but for some reason my comments don't appear in the stream.

I wish there were a better alternative (could this be an opportunity?).

------
zaachary
Chris from the Identity team at Mozilla posted this in a separate discussion,
but it's a point that shouldn't be missed:

"Mozilla Persona is Free and Open Source all the way down, which is great, but
not quite good enough. You need to be able to choose your own provider and
switch from one (say Mozilla) to another (say Google or your own server)
whenever you want. So Mozilla Persona should just be one of many options for
your online account."

The author has a common misunderstanding of what Persona is and what it does.
Persona is not an account system and it is not "provided" by Mozilla. It is a
federated identity protocol that allows you to use your existing identity
(e.g., at Google or Yahoo or Facebook) to authenticate to relying parties. The
"account" is held by the Identity Provider (assuming the IdP speaks Persona),
and the IdP may also speak other federated identity protocols, e.g., OpenID
Connect.

Related confusion is in the below statement:

"Why not have your Persona account also handle your subscription list and
logs?"

There is no Persona account, unless the author means the user's account at her
Identity Provider.

------
wahsd
He makes a good point about all of those issues. It is already all kind of
there in Firefox in one form or another.

Especially about the RSS feed feature, everyone cried a river when Google
stupidly got rid of it's reader; here ya go, manage your feeds in the browser.
Bam, done! It was right there in front of us all along.

Side note; interestingly enough HN does not have an RSS feed. Just saying.

~~~
robdrimmie
HN does have an RSS feed, there's a link
([https://news.ycombinator.com/rss](https://news.ycombinator.com/rss)) in the
footer. It's not identified in a link as an alternate so auto-discovery may be
difficult.

------
junto
I have previously thought about a similar idea, where we have a standard for a
social media stream. People can pick lots of different social media hosting
companies. You tap in your social media updates and your hosting company hosts
that stream.

You tell your friends your social media URL and they add it to their social
media client. If your browser had a client, then it would be responsible for
merging all of those feeds into one news feed (just like Facebook's). The
important thing here is that everything can be decentralized. It is a bit like
merged RSS feeds.

Of course a majority of people would hand that responsibility over to a social
media hosting company (such as Facebook), but if you really wanted to, you
could write your own client, or hook it directly into your website.

Everything would be secure by default.

~~~
forteller
That sounds exactly like the idea behind federated social networks. I've
blogged about that in my post 'Think like the internet – Or how to fight
Facebook, and win" [http://blogg.forteller.net/2011/think-
internet/](http://blogg.forteller.net/2011/think-internet/)

------
apricot13
didn't flock try to do this and fail? they did go a bit over the top with the
social integrations though.

I personally prefer having my chat and browser separate although I do agree
with the need for RSS to be simplified/made more understandable for the level
of the average facebook user.

~~~
forteller
Yes, you're right. They tried to integrate social networks in the browser. But
as you say: They went over the top. I'm just suggesting making feeds
easier/better and integrating a chat function not dependent on Facebook or any
other of the big, closed players.

The other important reason why Flock failed was that they where new. Firefox
already has a huge user base who would just get these new functions trough a
normal update.

It's about visibility: People can't use what they don't know exists. Most
people didn't know Flock existed.

------
acdha
I hope they run with the idea of a single dedicated share button (like iOS):
you can add the services you use, rather than those that a publisher chose to
embed, and with more work it'd be nice for starting to back away from endless
third-party tracking because you wouldn't need to execute FB/Twitter/etc.
JavaScript on every page in the hopes that someone will use it.

There was some noise about this in August but it doesn't look like more than
an initial trial balloon: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/08/06/firefox-
makes-it-ea...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/08/06/firefox-makes-it-
easy-to-share-your-favorite-content-with-friends-family/)

~~~
voyou
Web Intents[1] would have helped with this, but they don't seem to have got
much traction (Wikipedia says Google have stopped working on the idea).

1: [http://webintents.org/](http://webintents.org/)

~~~
acdha
Agreed - I remember hearing about that but it feels like a relic of the days
when Google wasn't trying to shove everyone into Google+

------
maaarghk
Just ship diaspora by default. If I had any time to donate to OSS development,
I'd be there. And I think lots of other devs who want to make a difference to
the world through OSS should consider it.

------
code_duck
Facebook's functions - photos with comments, user profile pages, persistent
content - are more similar to web forums - database driven HTTP sites - than
to an XMPP chat system.

~~~
forteller
Absolutely. That's why I say we need many more things to take down Facebook.
This is just about starting, making it a little bit easier for people to not
spend close to 100% of their online lives in the walled garden of Facebook, by
giving them an easy option for two of their functions. It's not about
replacing Facebook completely, it's just a start.

------
runn1ng
So... the future should be to feature bloat browsers.

Opera already tried that. They weren't very succesful.

~~~
clarry
They've been feature bloated for a while now, and are still growing all the
time. Before Google gave the order to kill IE6 and the world switched from
optional to mandatory JS, one could've easily used something like links, w3m,
lynx, or a small 3kloc browser hacked in a weekend (been there, done that).
Things more or less just worked, and looked the way you wanted things to look.

Now? How many lines of code do you have in Gecko or Webkit, and a reasonable
browser built around them? And all the things they depend on? Let's not forget
you also need support for one of the most complex programming languages.
Browsers really are HUGE.

------
devx
It would be nice if they could secure communications end-to-end going through
Facebook chat or Google Talk, too, but I'm not sure that's possible anymore,
with both of them using pretty proprietary protocols or API's now.

------
icebraining
The site is not loading for me, here's the Coral Cache:
[http://blogg.forteller.net.nyud.net/2013/first-
steps/](http://blogg.forteller.net.nyud.net/2013/first-steps/)

~~~
forteller
Thanks! I also put up a mirror over on WP.com:
[http://forteller.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/mirror-first-
steps...](http://forteller.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/mirror-first-steps-to-
weaken-facebook-and-take-back-the-web/)

------
machbio
From the Business point of view, it should embrace facebook - if user
experience turns out bad, they will shift to chrome..which firefox would not
want for itself

------
shmerl
I think it's a wrong comparison. Direct competitors to Facebook are
decentralized social networks like Diaspora, not browsers.

~~~
forteller
Did you read the article? It's about weakening, not replacing.

As I say:

«Facebook is taking over the web and we need to save it. The issue is too
complex to have one solution. The most obvious solution is federated social
networks, but it’s also a very long term solution. We need more, sooner. One
of these thousand small solutions should be to take back chat and
subscriptions, by making them dead simple to use for everyone straight from
the browser.»

~~~
shmerl
While commonly used, chat is just one feature there. There are many popular
and closed chat services like Whatsapp for example which aren't connected to
social networks. So I don't see why you focus on this problem in the context
of Facebook. The problem is a problem in itself. I.e. "how to break the walls
of walled garden instant messaging networks".

~~~
forteller
Yes, you are of course right about that. It might just be a sign of my age
that I just mentioned Facebook as the bad guy in my post… :)

------
code_duck
Facebook's functions seem a lot more reminiscent of web forums - database
driven HTTP sites - than XMPP chat systems.

------
gesman
People have an organic need to procrastinate and Facebook satisfied this urge
of the weak.

~~~
adam419
Well said

------
abolishme
Am I the only one around here // who thinks Facebook works just fine!?

Also, if you want to compete with Facebook. Find a way to make a social
network company grow to 100s of employees _without_ advertisements. That's
really all it would take.

------
Tloewald
Facebook has a stranglehold on the web?!

------
antocv
Since you mentioned the horror that is XMPP, I am glad to know that this idea
and any project will fail and end up on the trashcan of internet history just
like all other "federation"/XMPP technologies, such as... oh wait we dont
actually have or use XMPP for anything it was meant to be.

Thats right, its only facebook and google internally that take advantage of
XMPP while keeping the rest out. Thats what federation does and this idea is
no better than jabber which we thought was a good idea 11 years ago.

This is a bad idea because a web browser should not become a chat or client as
well.

You know what is a good solution to the "facebook is taking over the web"
Remove their like-buttons from your pages! It is all of the web devleopers of
the world who chose to add facebook scripts to their webpage that are the
problem. Thats what needs to be solved. Facebook wouldnt be nearly what it is
if it wasnt for all those webdevs that thought it was good idea to run fb
scripts and snitch out their and the webs user.

This battle can be moved to the browser if need be, just run ghostry and
better privacy by default, block all accessess to facebook domains form any
other domains, and thats it.

~~~
forteller
> This is a bad idea because a web browser should not become a chat or client
> as well.

Well, the browser already is a chat client for millions of people. It's called
Facebook. So since the browser already is the only chat client tons of people
use, why not make it a client for a Free/Open chat system instead of Facebooks
chat system, that they control, censor, give access to to NSA, etc.

> Remove their like-buttons from your pages!

I agree we should do this. But that won't help people keep in contact with
their friends. And so it won't change the thing I'm focusing on here.

~~~
antocv
If your goal is to have a free and open uncontrolled, uncensored chat-system
that is NSA kinda proof then lets do that, Im all for it.

I just dont think XMPP fulfills the uncontrolled and uncensored and
surveillence resistent parts. We need to look at web of trust, bitmessage and
such instead, those are more fun problems than "to spite facebook".

But sure, any solution will benefit greatly if its bundled with the browser
since that appears to be the only program most users actually use on their
computing devices. Imagine if Tor and a tor-relay or even tor-exit-node came
preconfigured with every Firefox and turned on by default. That would be fun.

~~~
forteller
You might very well be right. Using XMPP is not important to me. The important
thing is the goal of moving as many people as possible over from closed to
Free/Open systems.

~~~
emn13
Free would be nice - but it's open that's the key (and if you have open,
somebody will make a free version anyhow)

~~~
forteller
Free as in Freedom :)

