Firefox + S3: Some Ideas for Developers

I'm a long-time Firefox fan and user, and I love to see how developers express their creativity by making interesting and useful extensions. Last week I read the new (and free) Firefox Facts ebook and discovered some cool extensions that I hadn't previously known about.

As I read the book, I realized that several of the extensions could benefit from integration with our new S3 service.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Clippings - Store and retrieve the set of shortcuts in S3.
• Coralize This - Push a file up to S3, set the appropriate ACLs, and then return the URL to the BitTorrent version of the file.
• Scrapbook - Save the page collection to S3.
• Storing Firefox bookmarks in S3 would be cool. Storing all of Firefox's state (ala Portable Firefox) would be even cooler. Or simply back up bookmarks and other profile data using BackupFox, or just the sessions like SessionSaver does.
• QuickNote and ReminderFox - Store sticky notes or reminders, so that you see the same set regardless of whether you are at home or at work, on your desktop or on your laptop.
• Wizz RSS Newsreader - Store all of the relevant state (list of feeds, list of read and unread articles) in S3. This would create a newsreader  with the easy, global access of Bloglines and the efficiency of a desktop application.

There's also room for new extensions that are unique to S3. For example, what about something like the Mozilla Amazon Browser or FireFTP, for the storage, management, and retrieval of files?

Moving on, plenty of Greasemonkey scripts could also make good use of S3. What if the Greasemonkey API was extended with save and load functions which directly accessed S3? How about a simple, safe, and central way to store the access key and the secret keys that are used to sign the S3 requests?

I hope that this is enough to get the gears turning in your mind and the code flowing from your fingertips! If you come up with something cool, please be sure to let us know.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Eric Giguere]

I realize you're trying to generate some excitement for S3, but it seems to me the market for such extensions would be small given that S3 is a paid service and there are free alternatives that can be used for storing Firefox (or other similar) data.

One idea would be to provide a free (with reasonable limits, of course) "personal" or "individual" license for S3. That might induce developers to build the extensions you describe.

[Jeremy Dunck]

Eric,
Can you link to those free alternatives?

I'm planning on doing a GM API using S3 as a backing store-- sure, it's a paid service, but you can store a lot of data for a nickle per month-- I'd use it for sure.

(The use of S3 wouldn't be exposed in the API-- other backing stores would be nice to have, hence the request for links.)