Will Mozilla’s BrowserID make usernames and passwords a distant memory?
For every site that requires a user account, they tend to follow the same process. Fill in the details, create a password and username, verify the account through a confirmation email and then log in with your email/username and password.
The idea of a universal web ID has already been thought up of and attempted. Services such as Open ID allow you to create a single account to sign in on sites that support it while Facebook Connect allowed you to do the same with your account. Now Mozilla are attempting to do the same with BrowserID, a new function designed to streamline the logging in process for sites.
By creating a single entry point for logging in, users aren’t required to remember numerous passwords to access social media accounts, instead using their email address instead.
While the traditional method for registering onto a site is a password and email address or username, BrowserID implements what Mozilla call their Verified Email Protocol which streamlines the process and allows you to log into sites faster.
Using the service
When users visit their first BrowserID site, they enter their email address and password where then, a unique link is sent to your email to verify this. Once they click the link, the user is signed into BrowserID and can use that address on every site that supports the service.
In other words, a user’s email address will become their identity tag when they are logging in on a site.
Therefore, a user can sign up to websites that require user accounts with few confirmation messages and without site-specific passwords. Mozilla’s Verified Email Protocol will also function as a method of retaining a user’s privacy when they use the service on a site.
The new tool is mainly to streamline website access for users but Mozilla are also designing it with developers in mind. On their blog post, they say “For a web developer, creating a new application always involves an annoying hurdle: how do users sign in?”
So far the service has only just been released and is currently in experimental stages with Mozilla asking people to test it on their site demo. It is hoped that the feature will be included in the Firefox web browser sometime in the future but its success will be determined by how many sites and the type of sites that will use the service.
