Firefox 2.0 beta (Bon Echo) was supposed to have Places, a complete rewrite of Firefox’s bookmark system with an SQL frontend. They pulled it at the last minute, however, because it was felt that they couldn’t perfect it in time for its scheduled release in October; it’ll show up in Firefox 3.0 (Q1 2007).

Places would’ve been a repository not only for bookmarks, but also for Live Bookmarks and History.

While it may have been an ill-timed add-on (in that the bookmark system had to be completely re-written), the rewriting of the bookmark system would’ve been rather useful for Firefox users.

However, I also think that Places would’ve (or will be) the start of the outsourcing of a long standing component of the Firefox browser.

Remember when Mozilla decided to outsource 4 of the 5 main components of Seamonkey (the original Netscape/Mozilla Suite)? Those are known today as Nvu (Composer), Sunbird (Calendar), Thunderbird (Email), and Chatzilla (IRC). What was left is known today as Firefox.

I think Firefox is heading to that point again as development progresses. Each release incorporates more of the useful third-party extensions as native components (Feedview, the extension that allows for you to read XML feeds in Firefox, will be incorporated natively into Bon Echo, for example).

Thus, if Mozilla intends to stay as relevant to newer generations of Firefox users, it will be fitting for it to begin outsourcing the older legacy stuff while incorporating the new and useful.

And as people are now storing and sharing bookmarks online (such as http://del.icio.us and others), it may make sense for Places (an offline repository for archived URLs) to be outsourced.

History repeats itself.