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Mozilla is experimenting with several ideas to push the browser envelope.

Including one that could turn the browser into a messaging hub.

The company said last week it has launched a browser add-on prototype named “Snowl” that displays Twitter messages, or tweets, as well as RSS or Atom feed content, in either a traditional single-window view within Firefox, or one featuring several separate panes, said Myk Melez, a developer who works in Mozilla Labs, the company’s research arm.

Snowl is part of broader work at Labs to explore both near-term tools for Firefox and longer-range overhauls of the browser. In Snowl’s case, Mozilla is trying to decide whether messages that normally appear in their own separate desktop client applications or via pop-up notifications, belong in the browser.

“We want to find out whether there’s a role for messaging in the browser,” said Melez. “Can it become a hub for messaging?”

Snowl - a compression of the words “snow” and “owl” - can be downloaded from Mozilla’s add-on site . Melez, however, warned users that as a prototype, Snowl may be buggy. “The initial prototype is a primitive implementation with many bugs, and subsequent versions will include changes that break functionality and delete all your messages, making you start over from scratch,” he said in a post to the Labs’ blog on Wednesday.

Source [ PC World ]