14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is making a play for becoming the single handler of your online identity. With the new features and API tools it unveiled last week, the social network could potentially ‘infiltrate’ any website in the world, effectively taking over the web in a sense. And Mozilla has a very similar idea. It too believes that a universal identity manager is a great concept, eliminating the need to create and remember accounts for countless websites. But it wants you to be in charge of it, not third-parties.
Enter Account Manager, the Firefox add-on introduced just last month. It has now graduated from Mozilla Labs and is a fully supported project within the Firefox team. The add-on has a new home and the project is really picking up Steam. Account Manager enables users to log in and out of a few big websites, like Google or Facebook, with just one click, as long as their username and password are saved with the password manager.
In the future, you will be able to create a new account at any site that supports the feature with the tool without the need to set up a username or password or fill out any of the other data. In essence, your browser will carry your entire online identity. Mozilla has big plans for the add-on and features it plans to build on top of it. Eventually, all of the functionality will be built into the browser.
“The Account Manager makes it incredibly easy for users to create new accounts with optional randomly generated passwords, and log into and out of them with just a click. As a web developer, adding support for this feature could take as little as fifteen minutes of hacking,” Dan Mills, from the Mozilla Labs team, wrote.
“We want to make signing into websites easier for all Firefox users, and are looking to ship this feature as soon as possible in Firefox. As part of that process we’re looking for feedback to refine the specification. Now is a really good time to get involved in defining the spec,” he announced.
Account Manager for Firefox is available for download here.