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Aza Raskin envisions new log-on system for Firefox
Over in his personal blog, Aza Raskin ponders the question of identity. And I don't mean the philosophical or gender sense of the word here; what he says is quite interesting: When you Google the words "sign in", you get about 1.8 billion hits.
And every site implements log-in functionality on its own, and somewhat differently. Yes, single sign-in solutions are available (such as XAuth or OAuth), but these revolve around letting websites share your details among themselves.
Raskin wants to go for a different model, which makes a lot of sense to me: it's your identity, so you should be able to control it directly; meaning, log on from the browser. What we have today are clunky "auto-fill" mechanisms, and browser password caches which are historically insecure. Raskin wants to take things to a whole new level, as you can see on the cool mock-up. The browser would store identities, and you would be able to select who you want to log on as via a simple, consistent interface, on the left side of the address bar (where you can see today whether as site uses HTTPS or not).
Personally, I can't wait. This is one key area to improve on the web.
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsNickApr 24th 2010 2:03PM
Brilliant.
gointernApr 24th 2010 2:55PM
roboform?
DeoWulfApr 24th 2010 4:07PM
This is definitely necessary. Now that it has been suggested, I don't want to browse without it...
I'm wondering about that Anonymous thing, though. Is that going to make it super-easy for spammers to engineer anonymous bots?
MxxConApr 25th 2010 6:03PM
this is a pretty interesting solution.
though this would work only for local computer, what if i'm away at some remote computer?
how would that work there?
using weave to sync?
but Aza himself says "Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company." :)
so that solution would have to be plug-able to allow non-default password/identity management solutions.