Firefox/Projects/AccountManager

The Account Manager project aims to help users manage the (currently manual and tediuous) process of signing up/in/out of sites by adding chrome-level status and knobs to give the user a consistent point to view and control of sign-in status to the current site.

The project has two main deliverables:

1. A protocol definition that sites can use to define their account-and-session management features in a format a web browser can understand. (The latest draft of the specification is here.
2. An implementation of this protocol in Firefox.

This project is a reboot of the Account Manager Labs project, see that page for more background information.

Drivers

• Dan Mills (Labs lead)
• Gavin Sharp (Firefox lead)
• Alex Faaborg (UX)
• You!

Status

• Starting Out

We're keeping track of sites that support Account Manager, see this list.

Non-Goals

• Greasemonkey-like hacks that work only on one site, except as needed only to demonstrate the potential for the feature.
• Creating new and interesting authentication/authorization schemes.
• Extensive hacking on Password Manager-like heuristics to make it only sort of work on more sites.

Requirements

• Status display
  • Unregistered, signed-out, and signed-in for supported sites [P1]
  • Notifications of site requests for sign-in [P3]

• Sign-up support
  • New id+secret pair negotiation [P1]
  • Automatic password generation [P1]
  • Optional feature to allow user-defined passwords [P1]
  • Remember preferred email and username(s) [P1]

• Sign-in support
  • Request existing user credentials for new/unknown sites [P1]
  • Two-click sign-in [P1]
  • Optional automatic sign-in on next session [P2]
  • Support for multiple accounts [P1]

• Sign-out support
  • Two-click sign-out [P1]

• Password change
  • User-initiated password change [P2]
    • To a new random password [P3]
    • To a new user-defined password [P2]

• Support for various authentication types
  • Form submission/cookie [P1]
  • HTTP Basic auth [P1]
  • HTTP Digest auth [P2]
  • Client certs [P3]

• Supports sync if installed [P1]

• Disables itself during private browsing mode [P1]

Dependencies

Generally speaking:

• Password manager
• Theme work, site button in particular
• Notifications, to a lesser extent

Related Projects

• Account Manager Labs project