Mozilla Offers Alternative To OpenID 105
Orome1 writes "Mozilla has been working for a while now on a new browser-based system for identifying and authenticating users it calls BrowserID, but it's only this month that all of its sites have finally been outfitted with the technology. Mozilla aims for BrowserID to become a more secure alternative to OpenID, the decentralized authentication system offered to users of popular sites such as Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, MySpace and others."
What is wrong with OpenID? (Score:5, Insightful)
- It is widely adopted among many providers
- It does not share any of your information cross-site unless you allow it
- It works
Why do we need yet another standard? I do not see anything in this article, on browserid.org, or anywhere else that breaks down why Browser ID is superior.
Also, I don't see Google Chrome adopting this, since Google backs OpenID, and I don't see Microsoft adopting it either. So really this is going to end up a Firefox only scheme that will never gain enough penetration to make sites want to go to the effort to implement it.
Obligatory xkcd (Score:1, Insightful)
Different problems (Score:5, Insightful)
I think BrowserID and OpenID solve slightly different problems. BrowserID standardized the process of you logging in through your web browser while OpenID is about authenticating yourself through some authority (be it a server controlled by you or some third party). So that's a user-website interaction for BrowserID or website-website for OpenID.
They could actually be used together, any service that accepts OpenID logins could expose a BrowserID interface too.
Re:What, me worry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Locks, and security in general, are intended to raise the cost of unauthorized access beyond the utility of that access. Success by that measure is effective security.
Re:Simplicity (Score:4, Insightful)
We may not be able to brand him a flip flopper (and the Nazi ref is just tasteless and pointless) but we CAN label him a dumbass and obviously not the right man for the job when he doesn't even bother with a single survey of his actual CUSTOMERS before pulling such a bonehead stunt. Moz may be "free as in beer" but if they don't have users they can't get Google or anybody else to pay for their search results so they had damned well better listen to their users. As we saw here recently the figures show FF has been in a solid death spiral since Version 4, with it shedding more and more users by the month as they get tired of the bullshit. I myself started looking for alternative at V 4 when it started sucking on AMD CPUs and bailed on V 6 for Comodo Dragon. I still have FF installed and keep it updated as well as try each new version but so far its still sucking on AMD CPUs and the CPU spiking and RAM usage, especially on the Zacate dual cores and the older low power singles and multicores like the Phenom e series really sucks.
So instead of wasting their resources and time trying to replace a project that frankly nobody really used in the first place, how about listening to your damned customers and fixing the fricking browser, how about that? Remember the ORIGINAL mission statement, the one you used to get us off the suite, to "build the fastest and lightest standards complaint browser" remember that? Ever since Google released Chrome its been a "ohh me too!" fest at Moz and frankly it sucks. the UI sucks, the performance sucks, and I'd argue its because they are trying to jam shit on there Gecko was never made for, like flash plugin isolation, which at least on AMD causes FF to suck as much as twice the resources playing an SD video as any of the Chromium based.
And finally please fanbois, or those that have "perception bubbles" as I've been told to call you by someone who was offended at the word fanboi, please don't trot out some benchmark because i can trot out one that says the GeForce FX was actually a great Dx9 chip. Of course we all know now that they were writing to the bench which made the benches worthless but IRL all you have to do is use what I call the "Hairyfeet normal folks test" where you fire up a tool like process explorer that will give you the complete resources of a program then send the browser through the basic sites everyone goes to, YouTube, FB, Yahoo Mail/Gmail, and check the resource usage and you'll see for yourself that FF don't stack up so good.
So please moz devs, quit trying to be the saviors of the web and fix your shit first, okay? there are a hell of a lot of us that would be happy to come back to the fold if you'd just quit trying to make a bad Chrome ripoff and go back to making a small fast standards compliant browser we can DIY customize with extensions. Nobody has an extension framework as good as yours, nobody. some come back moz, quit all this crap that has nothing to do with your core business and get back in the business of making browsers because as the numbers show the way you are going now is NOT the correct way to go. kinda sad you are talking about "hiding" the LTS on some back page somewhere just because you are afraid that everyone will dump the main branch for LTS, doesn't that smack you witrh a cluebat that you are on the wrong path?