Wouldn’t it be annoy­ing to log in to every new hour? Maybe even with dif­fer­ent pass­words in dif­fer­ent loca­tions — for secu­rity rea­sons? Lucky you don’t have to con­stantly fill out forms in real life, but these days every heavy user of social media has got­ten used to mul­ti­ple reg­is­tra­tions and an immense load of pass­words. But Fire­fox is going to change that by estab­lish­ing the browser as the “trusted agent” when it comes to han­dling your online identity.

OpenID aims for a unique web-identity, but the ser­vice is far from wide-spread. Guess what: Google, Face­book and plenty oth­ers offer their own ver­sion of a “uni­fied login”, which makes the term sound kind of absurd. Read­WriteWeb has got some inter­est­ing details on an upcom­ing Fire­fox feature:

Fire­fox gets dis­trib­uted social net­work­ing and iden­tity man­age­ment. 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 dis­creet 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.

Sounds like phisher’s and root-kiddy’s par­adise, but actu­ally the cur­rent solu­tions are even worse. Mozilla devel­oper Azarask says:

Most cur­rent solu­tions involve lots of redi­rects or iframes, which leads to a con­fus­ing and phish­able expe­ri­ence.
[…]
Your iden­tity is too impor­tant to be owned by any one com­pany.
Your friends are too impor­tant to be owned by any one company.

I couldn’t agree more, even though I stopped copy-pasting pass­words long ago and started using Robo­form, a soft­ware for IE and Fire­fox that man­ages all pass­words and auto-fills forms quite reli­ably. I also agree that it makes sense to keep data on the local machine in some cases:

A Solu­tion: 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).

Aza has posted a rough draft includ­ing a cou­ple of scrib­ble. Mozilla foun­da­tion is cur­rently look­ing for peo­ple who want to get involved in the devel­op­ment — I like the idea a lot and I also dearly hope that some day Fire­fox will ren­der JS-heavy web­sites as fast as Chrome cur­rently does. Because I wouldn’t trust Chrome enough to pass any login data except for my Face­book and my Google logins