If you’re like most of us, you probably have contact and address book data spread all over the web — friends on Facebook, contacts in Gmail, followers on Twitter, and names in your local address book application.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all that data were available in one place where you could see it all, control which sites have access to it and manage your on and offline friends?

The truly unified address book is still a ways off, but there is hope it will be especially useful once it arrives thanks to some emerging standards.

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body that creates and oversees web standards, has published a working draft of what’s known as the Contacts API. The goal behind the Contacts API is to provide a way to unify your address book, pulling from both local and online sources, and to allow you to better control how third-party websites access your data.

The latest draft incorporates feedback based on the earlier draft, first published back in January of 2010. It builds upon the work being done on vCard and Portable Contacts, among other contact systems already being used on the web. The final version is penciled in for mid-2011.

The Contacts API is part of a broader initiative at the W3C called the Ubiquitous Web Applications activity. The purpose of the group is to develop underlying infrastructures web services can take advantage of to make web apps more powerful and more useful. The Geolocation API, which lets a web app learn your location, and the Devices API, which lets a web app access a camera or microphone in your hardware, are also part of the same initiative. It also fits into the ideals outlined by the W3C’s vision of a semantic web.

So what will the Contacts API standardize? Currently, if a site wants to access your contacts list it generally does so by grabbing, say, your whole Gmail contacts list. Even with standards like OAuth, which gives you control over which sites can access your contacts list, you still don’t have much in the way of fine-grained permissions.

Say you want Facebook to only grab contacts that you’ve put in the address group “friends” in your Gmail address book. With the current controls, you’re out of luck. But if and when the Contacts API is ratified and adopted, that’s exactly the sort of thing it would allow you to do.

The Contacts API would also give the browser a method of unifying all your various contacts lists — for example your contacts from Gmail, Facebook and your local address book all merged to single list.

It sounds grand, no doubt, but the Contacts API is a long way from reality. Mozilla has experimented with the API (along with other tools) to create the Labs project Contacts, but like the APIs it uses, Contacts is still very much a work in progress.

See Also:

• Mozilla Contacts Helps Firefox Discover Your Social Web
• Mozilla Labs Seeks to Tame Your Address Book With ‘Contacts’
• New Google Contacts API Taps Your Gmail Address Book
• Access Your Gmail Contacts From Any Site

Hopefully they get this figured out soon.  I know that, as a data provider and a Mac user, it has annoyed the heck out of me forever that I had to borrow a friend’s Windows machine just to log in to make a required password change.

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Anyone that is still using Internet Exploder (cough…gag…choke) I highly recommend trying Firefox on windows.  Those with a Mac, of course, probably use Safari, though Firefox has some merits on OS X too.

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If you ever doubted Firefox’s add-ons have played a major role in the browser’s success, Mozilla has some staggering numbers to prove you wrong.

The Firefox add-on website recently passed the two billion downloads mark.

That’s more add-ons downloaded than there are people on the web. Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone has add-ons installed — many of us have a dozen or more add-ons installed at any given time — but Mozilla has previously shown that some 150 million add-ons are in use every day.

Of course the word “add-on” is a little vague. Mozilla isn’t just counting web developer favorites like Firebug or YSlow, but also things as simple as Personas themes, which might explain why the numbers are so high. For instance, if you frequently change Personas, you’re downloading a new skin every time, and that drives the numbers up.

UPDATE: The original version of this post incorrectly stated that Mozilla was including individual downloads of Personas in its count. The two billion number is new downloads of extensions and themes since 2005. Personas are not included in the count.

Still, there’s no question that Firefox users love their add-ons, and Mozilla has the McDonalds-esque number to prove it.

If you’re looking to extend Firefox, or just curious about what other people are using, check out the new “Best of 2 Billion Firefox Add-ons” collection Mozilla has posted. There are number of web developer favorites, including the aforementioned Firebug and YSlow, as well as some other must-haves like NoScript, Xmarks and Greasemonkey.

See Also:

• Finding the Best Firefox Add-ons Gets Easier With New ‘Collections’
• Xmarks Syncs Open Tabs Across Browsers, iPhone
• The Best Chrome Add-ons for Web Developers

The next major milestone of the Firefox browser has been released into the wild.

Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. We were expecting it last week, as Mozilla had initially estimated the first beta would be available in June, but it’s here now. This release is for the adventurous only — it’s the first beta so it’s stable enough, but not rock-solid. So, if you’re eager to get an early peek at the next generation of Firefox, go forth and download.

The thing that probably matters most to everyday users is speed, and after using it for an hour or so, I can report that Firefox 4 is noticeably much faster than the various 3.x builds on my desktop.

Page load times are speeding up substantially across all the browsers now — Chrome and Safari recently received upgrades with hefty speed boosts, the new Opera 10.6 is on par with those releases, and the new Microsoft IE 9, due later this year, is also showing off some impressive speed in its current release, Platform Preview 3. Speed is one area where Firefox has recently drawn low marks, with some users switching to Chrome simply because it’s so nimble. But Firefox 4 appears set to change that when the final version arrives in a few months.

We covered much of what’s new in our Firefox 4 preview in May, but there are two new features in Tuesday’s release.

First, there’s a new look for Windows users. Tabs are now on top by default (a la Chrome). Mac and Linux users will get this feature as a default in subsequent betas. If you want to try it now, just go to View > Toolbars > Tabs on Top to enable it. Windows users, you can switch the option off using the same method if it’s not your thing. Also new for Windows people is the orange “Firefox” button in the top left. Click it and you get a dropdown filled with the most popular application menu items.

The new Firefox button. Click for larger.

The other new feature — and this is for all OSes — is an integrated Feedback button next to the search box. Click it to report anything that Firefox did to “make you happy” or “make you sad” (Mozilla’s actual wording). The Feedback system incorporates the Test Pilot add-on from Mozilla Labs to collect and anonymize the feedback.

Other big stuff in this beta:

• Support for WebM video
• More support for emerging web standards like CSS 3, Canvas and Web Sockets
• Better page-rendering performance, including a new HTML5 parser
• Crash protection that prevents bad plug-ins from blowing up the whole browser
• New add-ons manager
• Recently updated Jetpack SDK for new-style lightweight add-ons

Syncing, hardware acceleration and new themes for Mac OS X and Linux are coming soon, probably in the next beta release. So stay tuned.

See Also:

• Firefox Update Gives Flash 45 Seconds, Then Pulls the Plug
• Mozilla Moves Tabs to the Top for Firefox 4
• First Look: Firefox 4 Preview Delivers Speed, Revamped Interface

Mozilla has an answer to site-centric identity systems like Facebook’s — put the browser in charge of your online logins instead.

The Mozilla Labs project called Account Manager has graduated from Labs and will soon be making its way into Firefox proper.

Account Manager allows you to log in and out of websites directly through the browser, rather than relying on a particular site’s login form. Using a new menu item in the main toolbar — a button with a picture of a key that sits next to the address field — Account Manager lets you pick a login to use at any site you visit. It stores logins you’ve already created, suggesting them whenever they can be used. It can also generate (and remember) random passwords to make your logins more secure. It’s a radical step up from Firefox’s current Password Manager feature.

Mozilla’s decision to put this new button directly into Firefox’s toolbar brings us one step closer to realizing a ubiquitous social network on the web, where you’re logged in and connected to your friends wherever you go. All the while, you remain in total control of your own identity since you can tinker with all of your logins and connections through some simple panels in the browser.

There’s no word yet on when this will make it into Firefox, but we may see it as soon as Firefox 4, which is due in early 2011. For now, Account Manager is separate add-on you can grab from the Mozilla website. The add-on is still a beta release and there are some known bugs, but in our testing, it performed as advertised.

At the moment, Account Manager works with Google, Yahoo, Facebook and several Mozilla sites. Mozilla is planning to add support for other authentication systems, including OpenID, in the near future. The post on Mozilla Hacks also has instructions for site owners that let them add support for Account Manager with “only 15 minutes of hacking,” though we suspect it will become easier to implement support once the spec is fully formed.

There are several advantages to letting the browser handle logins. The most obvious is that the login form is always in the same place, with the same user interface regardless of which site you’re on, which would make the login experience easier for less-savvy users. Such a feature is also particularly useful if you have multiple accounts on a single site (all too common with the explosion of social networking) and need an easy way to choose which account to sign in with. It also means that, for example, Firefox could implement a sort of “fast user switching” feature that would let you change Facebook accounts with just a click. Ditto for Gmail, Twitter or any other supported website.

Along with its Contacts and Weave projects, Account Manager is part of a larger effort to make Firefox a central part of your online identity. Mozilla calls this its Online Identity Concept Series. It is being developed at a time when web identity is under renewed scrutiny, with Facebook’s announcement last week of its Open Graph protocol for sharing content across websites, and its adoption of new technologies to let people use their Facebook accounts to log in to other sites on the web. Twitter also launched a web-wide sharing feature called @anywhere, which builds on the some of the same identity technologies adopted by Facebook.

Once Mozilla gets all three of its identity projects working together, you would be able to login, discover friends on new websites and sync all your data across computers, effectively eliminating the need for a centralized system like Facebook’s or Twitter’s by handing the job of making connections off to the browser. You could still use whatever login system you like, but you wouldn’t be reliant on any single provider.

And according to insiders, this path makes total sense.

Chris Messina, an OpenID Foundation board member and a longtime advocate of open web technologies, recently posted a video series outlining the work he did with Mozilla last fall to build identity management into the browser (Messina has since taken a job at Google).

“A browser is usually called a user agent, and the idea is that it’s software or a program that acts on your behalf,” Messina says in his post.

If your browser knows who you are, and who your friends are, it can show you photos or status updates posted by your friends, plus other types of social interactions.

“By layering in concepts like identity, the hope is to upgrade the browser into something that is more personal,” he says.

At Facebook’s F8 developer conference last week, Raffi Krikorian from Twitter was speaking on a panel about identity technologies, and when the conversation turned to whether or not the browser should handle logins and social connections, he agreed that such a development would be “a huge step forward for the web.”

“Since the browser exists in between the web service and the user, it makes perfect sense for the browser to handle those identity-management tasks,” Krikorian said.

Thus far, that is still a ways from reality, but with Account Manager out of Labs and headed into Firefox proper, Mozilla is getting closer to this goal.

If you’d like to add support for Account Manager to your own website, be sure to check out the post on Mozilla Hacks which walks you through the steps. It’s not overly complicated, but you will need to be familiar with JSON.

See Also:

• Mozilla Contacts Helps Firefox Discover Your Social Web
• Facebook Adopts Open Standard for User Logins
• Mozilla Labs Seeks to Tame Your Address Book With ‘Contacts’
• Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data