14 DAY TRIAL // The web is shaping up more and more as an extension of our identity. Social networks, wikis, even the search engines, know a lot more about ourselves than we realize and everything is becoming more catered and more integrated. It's no surprise then that there's a battle brewing for our online identities and two players are standing out, Google and Facebook. There's definitely a need for a standard and unified online identity, but should this fall into the hands of one company, any company? Mozilla doesn't think so and wants to tackle the issue at the browser level.
Mozilla's user experience head Aza Raskin has some thoughts on the issue and has released some mockups of a possible way to handle logins and everything that has to do with identity inside the browser. He proposes that the entire login and signup process should be done by the browser, providing a unified and consistent experience across any number of services and sites.
“Most current solutions involve lots of redirects or iframes, which leads to a confusing and phishable experience. Besides the poor user experience, we are seeing market-moving effects of the identity/log in problem. Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect both let you use your pre-existing identity and social graph to super-power other websites. The problem? Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company,” Raskin wrote.
In his mockups of how the system would look, the different login statuses are reflected in the address bar with dedicated buttons. If the user isn't logged in, s/he will be able to do so using the buttons and the browser will use the account information already stored if it's available. Once you're logged in, your user name and the provider of the account will show up on every site that uses the credentials. Another important point is that you should be able to login anonymously while still being able to use the services.
Everything is at a very early stage for now and at this point there's just an exchange of ideas. But the first steps are already being made with the Account Manager project, part of the broader Weave project over at Mozilla Labs. The Account Manager is a spin-off of the Weave Sync add-on which is getting closer for the 1.0 release. At one point, Weave Sync also had some auto-login features, but they were removed to focus on the core functionality. Those features are now taking shape as the Account Manager, which will be the focus of the dev team after Sync gets fleshed out.
