What do you do when you first fire up your browser? Most probably, you log into various sites that require a username and password – Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and the like. For me, personally, it’s quite a chore, as I need to log into over 10 different services before I start doing anything.
Now, Mozilla sets out to alleviate this issue with a new Firefox plugin called Account Manager. It currently doesn’t do much; it recognized that you’ve signed in into a website and displays an icon that says that yes, you’re indeed signed up under that username. However, Mozilla has ambitious plans for online identity management from within a browser. From their blog post:
“Your Web browser, as your most trusted relationship in your life online, has nearly perfect knowledge of everything you do on the Web. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience. To realize this vision, we need to increase the browser’s understanding of your online identity and provide a platform for building new capabilities that securely take advantage of this rich, dynamic set of data that represents the digital “you.””
The account manager is available as an early, experimental alpha version, and it works only with Yahoo!, Facebook and Google, as well as some of Mozilla’s sites that require login, such as Bugzilla. Hopefully, in the future we’ll see features that really make switching between different user accounts and sharing content on various social networks easier and more streamlined.
Tags: account manager, facebook, Firefox, Google, mozilla
