542737 - Firefox lacks of a web server

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 167954

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Nicolas FROIDURE]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 GTB6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 GTB6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Firefox should have a web server to allow extension developers to innovate and web applications to interact with him.

Here are some examples of what could be done with it for user freedom, standards and innovation :
- open-id : the users should provide their own open id server (they only need it when they're using their browser)
- micro-blogging : users could host their own micro blog based on standards
- rest APIs : web application could interact with REST or SOAP APIs for many purposes like : file/data storage, social sharing etc...
- decentralized search engine : i think it could be great if a standard could allow a privileged access to the Firefox awesome bar in oder to search into friends historic/bookmarks. It could maybe be interfaced with Dictionaries and KGen to get a more complete semantic classification of browser history/bookmarks. It could be compatible with the OpenSearch standard.
- etc : i thought to this kinds of "killer?" apps but there's certainly a lot of different way to make innovation with the help of the add-on developers.

Thank you for taking it in count.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Nicolas FROIDURE]

I forgotten to talk about ecological benefits of this kind of approach of a web browser. Instead of creating datacenters, it could be interesting to lets user hardware do that. One more reason to include a web server into browsers.

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

You mean like Opera Unite or the POW add-on for Firefox (see <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3002>) ?

Comment 3

[David Dahl :ddahl]

there are add-ons that do this, plus you could create an addon that uses mozilla's httpd.js

Comment 4

[Nicolas FROIDURE]

Add-ons and external scripts are a first step. I think that it could be much better if it was in the browser by default. I've post the content of this bug in the wiki of httpd.js to encourage add-ons developpers to use web servers.

I think that there could be some conflicts if there are'nt any uniformisation of the use of http server in the browser.

By the way, including a web server by default will encourage add-on developpers to use it.

Comment 5

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

dupe of bug 167954?

Comment 6

[Andre Klapper]

Yes, dup. Thanks for catching it.