Readers may be interested in this posting by Mike Shaver, the architect working on technology strategy issues that are of significant interest to the Mozilla community and products – including Firefox:
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.
Mike was clear from the first day I met him that there is a whole process to go through here – first of investigation and consultation, then of considering the alternatives and figuring out what is best for his community, and finally of making a decision and winning consensus. Mozilla – and all of us in the industry – are very lucky to have him around. I wish each of us, in pushing identity forward, could just snap our fingers – and everything would just fall into place. But the world demands more of us and then gives us more in return.
[tags: Identity, Mozilla, Mike Shaver, Identity Metasystem ]
