14 DAY TRIAL // For a few months now, Mozilla has been working on creating an alternative to the Googles and Facebooks of the world, at least as far as providing identity and login information to third-party sites is concerned.
BrowserID is an identity technology that is designed to make it easy for users to sign up and log into any website without having to remember tens of username and password combinations, use their Google or Facebook account, or, worst yet, use the same password everywhere.
The technology is coming along and Mozilla has announced that it plans to start using it on its own websites, all of them, in the coming months.
"Over the next few months, we’ll be deploying BrowserID on Mozilla web sites," Mozilla announced.
In anticipation of the move, Mozilla is providing an overview of what BrowserID is, how it works and what's the whole idea behind it.
Mozilla developed BrowserID to provide users with an alternative. With so many websites and services, it's a hassle to sign up for each and every one of them with different credentials.
So many have started allowing users to sign up and authenticate themselves using ubiquitous accounts, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and so on.
The problem is, all of these companies have a commercial interest in owning data about you. Mozilla wants to provide the same service but with the assurance that no data on you is required or stored.
BrowserID will be built into Firefox and perhaps other browsers if they choose to adopt it, but websites can also integrate the technology on their own.
Your data, needed for the login process, meaning an email address and a password (it's hash), are stored on Mozilla servers. A nice touch is that they can use several email and password combinations, meaning that they create an email account for the sole purpose of using it with BrowserID.