Read/Write Web is reporting that Firefox 3 (don't forget that 2 just came out) is going to have deep microformats support:

Alex Faaborg explains that microformats will make the Web Browser into an "Information Broker" and suggests that this could happen in Firefox 3. He writes:

"Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online. This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc."

[...] Mitchell Baker from Mozilla calls this "data-browsing" in another post. And Alex has links to more info on Mozilla's microformats project on this page. I particularly enjoyed this discussion of which microformats Firefox 3 might support. Alex noted in that post:

"Detecting information in Web pages and handing that information off to other applications changes the role of the Web browser from being solely a HTML renderer to being an information broker."

As of now, there is a Firefox addon called Operator, a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. So the seeds have started to be sowed.

I tried Operator but I had to uninstall it: it's too much work to trawl through the DOM looking for microformats every time one switches web pages. Perhaps Adobe's gift of an efficient JavaScript engine will improve the situation where we won't care how expensive (within reason) JS programs are.

Here's more from Faaborg: microformats introduction, structured data chaos.

The PC Advisor reports that Google plans to extend its search results to give Google Base (read more) results also:

Google plans to extend the product search capabilities on its main Google.com search engine in the fourth quarter, in time for the holiday shopping season.

[...] When people search for products on Google.com, the system will present them with another search box so that they can refine their query, according to Bear Stearns & Co analysts.

After people refine their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service.

That is, if your company places information about "widgets for sale" into Google Base (with price, picture and description information), people searching for "widgets" on Google will be given the option of seeing the "for sale" results.

The Read/Write web believes this will pose a problem for microformats; I'm not so sure -- microformats are a way of specifying structured data elements in a web page in a formal and open way. Google Base is a proprietary database run by Google Corp -- if you can create the data to go in the latter, you should have no trouble publishing it for the former.