Firefox's Plan to Kick the Login's Butt
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 discrete 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? Accuse us of punning, but definitely sign us up. Google Chrome: Start taking notes.
Our friends at Mozilla posted this teaser back in the spring, when they touted a way to eliminate clicks and keystrokes between navigating to and being recognized by a given website.
Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick enthused, "Earlier this week, we argued that browsers and social networks were fast converging, and that with more users and some feature advantages, Firefox could be the best real competition for Facebook... This is just one more chapter in a much larger story - but look how easy this makes OpenID to use!"
But now, Mozilla's UX chief Aza Raskin has posted more updates to his personal blog that indicate new hotness is coming soon. The new feature will harness the power of Mozilla's Weave to make your online identity something that's stored in your back pocket more than it's stored in your cookies or a third party's server.
Decrying redirects and iframes, Raskin tells of a brave new world where an in-browser button that defies navigational difficulties allows for something closer to true identity portability than we've seen yet:
Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web. Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration, and identity. Searching for "sign in" on Google yields over 1.8 billion hits. And yet, the browser does nothing to make this experience better save for some basic auto form filling. The browser leaves websites to re-implement identity management, and forces users to learn a new scheme for every site... Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.
Finally! They said it!
And now, we give you screenshots:
So, what's the verdict, readers? Does this surpass Chrome's identity-porting capabilities? Does this create massive privacy issues for users who don't want their personal traffic tracked?
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That is really cool, everyday I am using firefox, and I only use firefox when surfing the web. Because it is the most safest web brower.
Exceptional concept! A simlar solution would dramatically reduce the friction to use new web applications!!
I dunno man.
Are there privacy issues with something like this? Absolutely! Are there issues with Google scanning my e-mails when a friend writes to me about a top secret project, and Google gives me ads to my nearest competitors? Sure. Does that stop me from using Gmail? Do I stop using X-marks, and opt out of pagerank? No, that would be silly. Between the parties in the quasi consortium of web players we have out there these days, there is no privacy. Unless you take some serious steps to protect it. That's the bottom line. Question you need to ask yourself when you do though; is it worth it? Generally, my answer is no.
Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/terriblewizard#36996
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November 24, 2009 10:54 PM
very cool, however, i will never forget Jolie O'Dell's racist article against white people not too long ago. what an idiot.
This will be a welcome relief if they can do it right. It's going to be tricky though. Can't wait to see how they're doing it.
Personally, I wish Mozilla would fix Firefox's memory management issues.
It would be interesting to see if Mozilla Weave will remain as firefox addon or become its integral part.
Just doing this in Firefox is nice but not really a fix for identity. Identity needs to be portable and that means it working on mulitple browsers, in desktop applications and on mobiles.
This will be nice to get some ideas but a bunch of those that create browers and so on need to get together to solve this in much the same way as they worked on the WS* specifications.
Complex stuff.
Posted by: https://openid.org/steven
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November 25, 2009 1:28 AM
I think the UI of RPX is far from optimal anyway. This approach is far more intuitive and trustworthy. It also lowers the burden for sites to integrate a login for multiple IDPs. My RWW article about the Web of Identities draws a picture of whats next after logging in and reading profile info for, e.g., brand sites.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_of_identities_making_machine-accessible_people_data.php
I'd love to discuss this with you. Contact me via @alexkorth
Cheers,
Alex
The NewsCred guys are leveraging this trend.
This is an awesome idea. Can't wait for the other browsers to adopt this.
@Clarky are you will you post some facts to backup that statement (safetest browser)?
Posted by: islandinthenet.com
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November 25, 2009 4:16 AM
Looking forward to the release of this feature
Interesting concept, thanks for sharing the screenshots!
I am currently using 1Password as a Firefox plugin (on Mac) who does basically the same (albeit I assume that the tighter integration would result in an improved user experience.)
Security is/ will be an issue here but I think convenience will trump security concerns for most users!
This is uber-Cool. Mozilla is really thinking on USers problems and not only in performance.
Thats looks promising.
But it kind of reminds me of a another type of "locally-stored-identity", namley Windows Cardspace. Isn't it basically the same thing, only built in to the browser??
Thanks for sharing the link.
I have put forward a detailed analysis of Raza's ideas. There are some very good ideas there than any browser could implement immediately without danger: for example showing which client side certificate a browser was using when connecting to a web site. See the article:
http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/identity_in_the_browser_firefox
Really makes a ton of sense! Identity is already tracked using session cookies in the browser -- it would be quite intelligent to put a name and photo alongside it, and track it as a unit.
It's all shiny extra crap to me. Want to make me happy, Mozilla? Make it so I don't have to shut down my browser every few hours because you can't fix your memory leaks.
I think it's a great plan, but it's only the beginning of what needs to happen. While we live our life in the browser, we're also increasingly living life in the mobile space in multiple different mobile apps. Add to that instant messenger applications and all the other places your identity travels with you outside the web browser, and you can start to see why this should be merely the beginning.
Online identity needs to be abstracted out of the applications such as the browser or the IM client. Until that happens, every other solution is a stop-gap measure.
My single biggest gripe with firefox is how much of a resource hog it is. I run FF on Ubuntu, and it has been known to idle at 99% of my processor. New features are nice, but unless it's as light and fast as chrome... my long love affair with Firefox is over.
Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/terriblewizard#36996
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November 25, 2009 10:20 PM
Interesting that you've made no mention of Microsoft CardSpace which was part of IE 7 base. It was then open sourced to define Information Cards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Card
Mozilla rocks but need to speed up seriously:) please
Folks mentioning Information Cards (CardSpace is the MSFT version) in comments have a point that this work is all connected.
MSFT presented an OpenID selector at the latest Internet Identity Workshop as a result. Active Clients for Identity management were covered extensively at the beginning of the month at the Internet Identity Workshop. All the major players were in the room including Mozilla.
They were talking about how this can work across a whole variety of platforms/browsers/tools. http://iiw.idcommons.net/Active_Client_iiw9.
Dr. Ernie also covered the session at IIW it on his blog - http://ihack.us/2009/11/10/active-identity-clients-aics-for-openid/
The next IIW is May 18-20 in Mountain View http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com if you want to join the conversation in person there.
Very cool. I look forward to this immensely.
I particularly like the "phishing" warning on the login dialog.
I think it's a great plan, but it's only the beginning of what needs to happen. While we live our life in the browser, we're also increasingly living life in the mobile space in multiple different mobile apps