

Identity in the Browser (Firefox) - uggedal
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/identity-in-the-browser-firefox/

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antimora
Tired seeing people quote Google search result counts and do it wrong. If an
exact phrase, such as "sign in", is being searched, it must be wrapped in
quotes! Otherwise numbers hugely will be inflated. So it's not 1.8 billion
hits, but rather 322 million.

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xal
That's where identity really belongs. Please don't make me make accounts for
sites in 2010! (OpenID works well enough as technical plumbing but it's not
the correct layer of abstraction).

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netcan
Google is going to have a lot of incentive to solve this problem. If you have
to sign in or worry about phishing every time you want to write a note or save
a picture from your camera, Chrome won't be as useful.

~~~
wmf
Docs: [http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-
os/chrom...](http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-
os/chromiumos-design-docs/login)

"The Chromium OS-based device login mechanism will provide a single sign on
(SSO) capability that users can use to streamline access to cloud-based
services."

Presumably regular Chrome will get the same feature.

~~~
netcan
Thanks for that. Highlights:

 _Chromium OS devices will be able to:

1\. Authenticate the user against Google if possible, so that it always uses
the user's latest password 2\. Enable the user to log in when offline
(assuming the user has logged in online at least once) 3\. Enable an SSO
experience for Google properties 4\. Allow the user to opt-in to auto-login
that still does SSO, but does not cache the user's password

We also plan to support alternative authentication systems:

1\. Give users an SSO experience at OpenID relying parties 2\. Give users an
SSO experience at sites for which they've already typed in credentials on a
Chromium OS device_

It's a reminder that Google has bitten off a huge chunk here.

One other huge example is Gears. I imagine that Google Gears is a central art
of the ChromeOS world. But Gears is still really an experiment. Very few
people really use it at this stage, certainly they don't rely on it. Very few
webapps really have a strong offline mode. Even Google webapps don't have
brilliant support yet. You can't even create a new document on Google Docs
while offline. What's the workaround? Keep a store of blank document ready.

I wonder how much will have come together by the time the first devices
launch. The ChromeOS experience at 2012 might be very different to ChromeOS
the ChromeOS experience 2010. It seems to me like ChromeOS assumes that
problems like SSO, data security, offline webapps, etc. will have been more or
less solved pretty soon.

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slvrspoon
as a guy with a startup focused on this area for 12 months, i am curious to
know what the group thinks about having some form of identity be stored in the
cloud by a single company (e.g. google) or managed locally at your PC/phone
(stored by NO company) and synched across devices?

