

You knew the old Mozilla, meet the new Mozilla - tbassetto
http://blog.ascher.ca/2011/12/19/you-knew-the-old-mozilla-meet-the-new-mozilla/

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Udo
This is entirely the wrong priority.

    
    
      I’ve been speaking to app & website developers about BrowserID 
      and Apps for a few weeks, and the feedback has been great — 
      webdevs & entrepreneurs are very aware of the dangers of relying
      on Facebook, Google, or Apple as the bridges to distribution or users.
    

I think the dangers of "relying on Facebook" et al are thoroughly outweighed
by the effects of those entities taking the web hostage, transforming it into
an oligarchy with inappropriate influence on the government as well as the
daily web surfing activities of their users.

What we need from you, Mozilla, is not "a better way to sign in", or better
support for whatever your vision of a web app store is. We need Web Intents
(<http://webintents.org/>), or your iteration of it. We need you to create a
kick-ass UI for this. We need you to help take back the web before it succumbs
to mega corporations entirely. Please, Mozilla, have the foresight to
recognize what's really at stake here.

~~~
mbrubeck
Mozilla is contributing to the Web Intents standardization and implementation
effort, and in fact Mozilla's Open Web Apps project and Web Intents are being
designed to work together and to benefit each other greatly (just as BrowserID
and Open Web Apps are being designed to benefit each other).

To be more concrete: When a web page uses an intent like "upload a photo",
Firefox will check to see if any of your "apps" support that intent. For
example, if Flickr has an OWA app and you have already installed it, then
Firefox will instantly ask if you want to choose one of your Flickr photos to
upload. If you click an intent that the browser doesn't already have a handler
for, it can offer to install an app from the web to handle the intent.

Open Web Apps is part of the infrastructure to turn Web Intents from a low-
level API into a complete user experience. And BrowserID is also part of that
integrated experience. (In the full vision for BrowserID where the browser
manages your identities, you can do things like install an app and be "logged
in" instantly without creating an account or typing a password.)

~~~
Udo
I just hope Web Intents makes it into the actual release - and in a way that
is usable by normal users. Seems to me this should be a priority, instead of
putting all that effort into yet another single sign-on fantasy.

If this happens as part of a large integrated experience as you promised
that's fine, but I fear that you are taking on too much, going for a complex
and over-engineered package that may never be ready or actually usable,
instead of concentrating on this one single important thing which really needs
to get done.

~~~
daa
I used to share your skepticism about single sign-on. I'm actually quite
bullish about BrowserID because it uses concepts that both users and websites
are very familiar with (email, 'validated email addresses'), and works it in a
flow that feels very much like facebook connect. It's really neat rather than
overengineered IMO (and I can say that because I didn't do any of the
engineering ;-).

Similarly, the apps project is a lot about recognizing what mobile apps did
well, and filling in the gaps in the web (stores, receipts, APIs) that will
make it possible for people to translate their mobile appdev skills into the
broader web.

------
melling
I've seen announcements for Firefox 9 all day. However, when I go to the
website I only see 8.

    
    
      http://mozilla.com

~~~
sciurus
For me, <http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/> shows a download for
Firefox 9.0 for Linux i686 English (US).

~~~
redthrowaway
It's FF8 for Windows.

~~~
daa
IIRC, there's a windows-specific bug that was discovered at the last minute.
They're fixing it & respinning.

