digital concrete
I ran across this article this morning, about how Microsoft is reaching out to other browsers like Firefox and Safari to encourage adoption of InfoCard technologies. The article is certainly true as written, and I’ve written before about some of my involvement in those discussions, but I would like to caution people against reading into it that we have made or announced concrete plans to support InfoCard as a piece of the Firefox platform.
I think that support for rich and user-empowering identity infrastructure is an important element of the future growth of both the web and Firefox, and I think — perhaps somewhat more controversially — that InfoCard’s principles and protocols are a pretty strong basis for that infrastructure, but there’s a big gap between those beliefs and an item in the committed Firefox roadmap.
For better or for worse, my still-forming opinions about technologies do not Mozilla technology policy make.
Perhaps a list of bargaining chips should be drawn up, we’ll support infocard if you support …
SVG, see what google can dream up to use it E4X, dump XML data islands and help along AJAX CSS3 stop re-inventing of border-radius everywhere
I’m not looking to determine our identity capabilities by barter, with MSFT or anyone else. We’ll support InfoCard if it makes sense for us to support InfoCard.
Microsoft looks to spread authentication technology to Firefox
Looking to ease the way customers manage their digital identities, Microsoft has begun working to integrate its InfoCard authentication technology with Internet Explorer and is in discussions with the Firefox and Safari browser developers to have them …
Why would someone want to choose infocard? This sounds to me like a “cookie” that everyone can access to verifiy my ID. So, if every site can recognize me, it’ll be quite easy to built up an exact profile. Well, I’m not really sure if I should say “yay, nice new technology” or rather “screw you” since, well. What’s infocard about anyway? Well, logins, but what except that? I don’t get it.
Xeen, it is pretty much the same overall process flow from a user perspective as what you would do to rent a video. To initially be trusted by a video store, they may require a government id or the like - something you went through the trouble to get. You get to choose which ID you present (drivers license, military ID, passport) or of course have the option to present nothing at all.