14 DAY TRIAL // Contacts in the Browser has just been updated. The Firefox add-on which aims to make it easier to manage contacts within the web browser just added a bunch of new features as progress is done at a fast pace.
While most of Mozilla is working on bringing Firefox 4.0 by the end of this year, which seems unlikely, a handful of teams are working on more interesting and experimental features in Mozilla Labs. Contacts in the Browser is one of them.
"Contacts, Mozilla Labs’ project which makes your browser aware of your online contacts and friends list, has been updated to version 0.4," Anant Narayanan, a veteran of Mozilla Labs who's worked on a number of big projects like Weave and Jetpack, announced.
One of the big new features is Contact Groups. "Contacts now supports the collection of contacts into named groups. Groups are displayed in the contact list," Narayanan explains.
The idea is to enable users to share only a number of their contacts with websites, the groups they choose.
The add-on supports existing groups made by other applications and will import them automatically. You can create any number of groups and a contact can belong to more than one contact.
Another big addition is support for the OAuth authentication protocol. For websites which have implemented it, Contacts in the Browser will try to use OAuth for login. The OAuthorizer add-on is installed in order to support this.
You can now merge contact data from different services for the same person. You can also split the data if it has been automatically merged. All the data can be exported now as VCard file.
Finally, Contacts in the Browser 0.4, supports native address book integration on Macs but only in the latest Firefox 4.0 beta builds. If you're using the Firefox 3.6 add-on version, you won't be able to use this feature because of changes to the Gecko rendering engine, Mozilla says.
Contacts in the Browser 0.4 for Firefox is available for download here.