Mozilla's BrowserID moves forward

Mozilla's BrowserID project, which aims to provide a simpler, more portable decentralised login and identity management platform, has moved forward with its first deployment within the non-profit organisation. Launched in July 2011, BrowserID is Mozilla's alternative to the somewhat stalled OpenID initiative.

Over the new year, Mozilla rolled out a non-localised, English-only, version of BrowserID to a number of development sites: Mozilla Apps Developer Preview, Firefox Affiliates, Mozillians, Add-on Builder and Mozilla Developer Network. The sites were selected because they were predominantly English-speaking or only available in English.

This is the first stage of the deployment which was announced in November 2011. Mozilla emphasises that BrowserID makes it simple to sign-on, but that it is not an automatic single sign-on system and does not log users into multiple sites at the same time; underlying BrowserID is a system that Mozilla calls Verified Email Protocol.

Developers interested in using Mozilla's BrowserID system can find details on how to incorporate it into a site as part of the project's GitHub repository. The repository includes a Node.js based implementation of a BrowserID server and verification service, licensed under the updated and recently finalised revision of the Mozilla license, the MPL 2.0.

The BrowserID project also found itself in the top ten winners of Black Duck Software's "2011 Open Source Rookies of the Year" program. Recipients are selected using a scoring system based on commit activity, size of project team and inbound links to the project; these are among the data gathered by Black Duck's Ohloh.net and KnowledgeBase products.

(djwm)