Mozilla Firefox aims to transform your online identity
Your online identity may soon be easier and safer than ever to carry with you thanks to Mozilla Firefox. ReadWriteWeb describes the recent development that holds the potential to transform how we interact with internet sites:
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.
In a recent post from Mozilla’s UX chief Aza Raskin provided some insight into where Firefox is headed with this innovation:
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.
In the same post Raskin details the role of the browser, and its potential:
The browser is your personal and trusted agent to the web. It’s the only actor on the Internet stage which both knows everything you do on the web, and never has to let that data leave the privacy of your desktop. Your browser knows you (or, at least, should).
You can also find a bit more detail about this from the Mozilla Labs Wiki:
It will help users manage logins and profile information for each site, and it will automate currently manual tasks such as signing up for sites, generating passwords, etc. The focus is on “traditional” login methods (e.g., form + cookie), but it will also have some support for OpenID/federated logins.
Other exciting possibilities that Mozilla profiles include the following use cases:
Two Click shopping for the whole web
Ben decides to buy some flowers for his fiancee. He goes to his favorite neighborhood flower store’s website and picks out just the bouquet he wants. When it comes time to check out and pay, he really wishes he didn’t have to enter in all of his billing data. Since he has stored his identity and credit card information on the Weave server, the web site is able to automatically pull in this information from the server. The browser prompts Ben to grant access to the server for just this transaction, he says yes and his purchase is complete.
Mass Password Reset
Chris left his laptop in the car a few days ago, and a thief broke his window and stole his laptop. Chris is now nervous that he could suffer from identity theft, and wants to minimize that chance. On his desktop machine he opens the Account Manager and changes his passwords to all his sites with a single action, locking out anyone who might have his stolen passwords.
Is a transformation set to transpire in the role the browser plays, especially when interacting with social networks and online identity? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
For such positions should be useful to give awards at full serious!
I hate the phishing emails they seem to get more determined by the day I get two or three on a daily basis and submit them to phishtrackers a web site I recently found which allows you to report them anonymously.