The good folks over at Mozilla Labs posted a screencast this morning of an experimental new way to log in to websites while using the Firefox browser. The approach leverages the Mozilla Weave platform, an eighteen month old technology that ties together the local browser experience, with online data stored for users.
The new login method lets users log in to an OpenID supporting site or a traditional username/password site with one or zero clicks. It’s a password manager, essentially, but it looks like an especially smooth one from one of the most trusted vendors online. And it syncs with the cloud so you could log in to your browser and then your favorite sites from any computer. It looks real nice.
Earlier this week, we argued that browsers and social networks were fast converging, and that with more users and some feature advantages, Firefox could be the best real competition for Facebook. We didn’t expect to see a new development this juicy and in support of our theory within just two days! Check out this video, which opens full screen in a new window:
This is just one more chapter in a much larger story – but look how easy this makes OpenID to use! If you’re a user of password management software, we’d love to hear how this interface appears compared to your existing tools. I use Sxipper, which does a good job of managing multiple accounts and will fill out whole forms but has an interface that can be pretty obnoxious sometimes. I would miss the form-filler, though, if I left it for this new Weave functionality.
User credentials are just one little form of data that Weave could help us carry from site to site to site. The browser as an instrument of data portability? Bring it on!
Dan Mills, from Mozilla, offers in depth discussion about the approach in his official blog post and the comments there are good. The answer to the big question – “when can I get this?” Soon, Mills says.
