Yanay Zohar

Logins suck. No matter how cleverly you try to control all you passwords (mega “secret” file? Password Manager software?)

It’s still lame, cumbersome, and interrupts your browsing experience way too often.

Imagine never needing to login, logout, register, or share with sites you just discovered “what was your mother’s maiden name”.

It’s obvious we need a simple, trusted and widely adopted solution to carry and manage our Master Key to the web.

Everybody wants to help

From social giants to private initiatives, everybody wants to ease our lives (and control our data).

Facebook is (successfully) luring developers and users to adopt their
“Facebook Connect“, saving users the need to register in a growing number of websites by using their existing Facebook login credentials.

Google, who’s always hungry to learn more about us, pushes their
“Friends Connect“, which is basically the same deal.

There is also the OpenID initiative, that despite having all the right ingredients, still isn’t adopted widely enough.

Mozilla makes a move

Mozilla Labs, one busy web technology playground, is now playing with an innovative concept: integrating “you” (your identity) into the browser.

Why should we let our browser (Firefox) hold the keys to the kingdom?

Aza Raskin, the Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs, explains:

Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.
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.

Some early UI mockups show the general direction of how the integration should look & function (see below).

Though this might generate a smoother experience for the user, I think some issues are still not fully addressed:

* How will it sync between multiple computers? (and across mobile devices?)

* I like my browser, I really do, but can I trust it more than say Facebook, or Google? Mozilla is just as hungry monster.

* Some people (even clever ones!) refuse to realize that Firefox is the way to go. No wide adoption base? no go.

What, no salvation?

I guess logins are going to be so 2010 as well.

In the mean time, I think I’ll stick to my good old RoboForm. Call me old fashioned, but knowing that all my secrets are kept on a physical disk-on-key rather than in the Cloud, helps me sleep better at night.