The Future doesn’t come with a login button
Wouldn't it be annoying to log in to every new hour? Maybe even with different passwords in different locations – for security reasons? Lucky you don't have to constantly fill out forms in real life, but these days every heavy user of social media has gotten used to multiple registrations and an immense load of passwords. But Firefox is going to change that by establishing the browser as the “trusted agent” when it comes to handling your online identity.
OpenID aims for a unique web-identity, but the service is far from wide-spread. Guess what: Google, Facebook and plenty others offer their own version of a “unified login”, which makes the term sound kind of absurd. ReadWriteWeb has got some interesting details on an upcoming Firefox feature:
Firefox gets distributed social networking and identity management. The good people who work on the revolutionary, open-sourced, and occasionally maligned browser have been hard at work on making cross-site navigation and portable IDs a solvable problem. A discreet button to the left of the URL that can tell users whether or not they are logged in to a particular site and allow them to log in without further navigation.
Sounds like phisher's and root-kiddy's paradise, but actually the current solutions are even worse. Mozilla developer Azarask says:
Most current solutions involve lots of redirects or iframes, which leads to a confusing and phishable experience.
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Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.
Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company.
I couldn't agree more, even though I stopped copy-pasting passwords long ago and started using Roboform, a software for IE and Firefox that manages all passwords and auto-fills forms quite reliably. I also agree that it makes sense to keep data on the local machine in some cases:
A Solution: The browser is your personal and trusted agent to the web. It's the only actor on the Internet stage which both knows everything you do on the web, and never has to let that data leave the privacy of your desktop. Your browser knows you (or, at least, should).
Aza has posted a rough draft including a couple of scribble. Mozilla foundation is currently looking for people who want to get involved in the development – I like the idea a lot and I also dearly hope that some day Firefox will render JS-heavy websites as fast as Chrome currently does. Because I wouldn't trust Chrome enough to pass any login data except for my Facebook and my Google logins :mrgreen: