Why we customize the Web

Abstract

This chapter examines the landscape of Web customization, particularly for the Mozilla Firefox. It specifically focuses on browser-hosted customizations, but a serious limitation of this approach is that the user's customizations do not easily move with them, as they use different browsers on different computers. CoScripter has an advantage here, because it stores all scripts on a wiki so that any Firefox browser with CoScripter installed can access them. Mozilla Weave is an effort to solve this problem in general by synchronizing Firefox extensions and other preferences across multiple installations of the browser. Although developing team have made a distinction in this chapter between "desktop" and "Web," in fact the Web platform considered might better be called the "Web desktop"-the Web as seen by a conventional Web browser such as Mozilla Firefox running on a conventional desktop or laptop with a big screen, keyboard, and pointing device. The future of the Web platform is much more diverse. Web browsers will turn up in a variety of different devices and contexts, including cell phones, netbooks, TV set-top boxes, home media servers, and wall displays. Mobile Web customization is already an active area of research, but much work remains to be done to give users the power to customize the Web of the future. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.