Mozilla's First Weapon in the Web Identity War: Account Manager for Firefox

As Facebook and Google battle it out to become the gatekeepers to your online identity, Mozilla is proposing an alternative, rather than having an online site or service provide you with identity features, why not have your browser play that role. The idea was first explored a few months ago, and the first steps are now being taken with a prototype version of the feature Mozilla dubs the Account Manager.

"As part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series, we’re actively exploring new approaches to online identity management in the browser. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience," Mozilla's Dan Mills wrote. "This prototype, which we are calling Account Manager, is an effort to dramatically simplify how users connect to sites. We plan to achieve this by adding the ability for the browser to intelligently act on your behalf," he explained.

How it works

The feature lives, for now, as a browser add-on, available here, which comes with some pretty minimal functionality. However, the core features and ideas are exposed well, the add-on enables you to log in or out of any site currently supported, not that many, but that's it. The add-on adds a key icon to the main tool bar, which lights up when you're visiting a supported site in the current tab. Clicking on the key will enable you to connect or disconnect from the site (log in or out), depending on the current state.

There are a couple of caveats at this point. Chiefly, the Password Manager feature in Firefox has to be enabled and a password for that site has to be saved in order for the feature to work. Also, for now, Account Manager only works for a handful of sites that Mozilla has hard-coded support for in the add-on, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Mozilla's own Mozilla Addons, Mozilla Bugzilla and Get Personas. At this stage, the add-on is more of a proof-of-concept. It worked fine with Google, but it failed to log into Facebook. The UI was also buggy on Linux.