Mozilla has announced that its Account Manager feature has graduated from being a Mozilla Labs project and that it will be included in a future release of the open source Firefox web browser. According to Mozilla Labs developer and Weave Lead Engineer Dan Mills, the Account Manager makes it easier "for users to create new accounts with optional randomly generated passwords, and log into and out of them with just a click."

The overall aim of the new feature is to make signing into websites a better and faster experience for all Firefox users. Planned supported authentication schemes include HTTP Auth, OpenID and others. Mills says that it could take "as little as fifteen minutes of hacking" for developers to add support for the feature. A developer meet-up is planned for the 20th of May to discuss the details of the specification.

The developers expect to ship the Account Manager feature in Firefox "as soon as possible". Users testing the Account Manager are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the Account Manager, including a short video, can be found in the Mozilla announcement and in the draft specifications document, in which the developers also discuss possible security issues including man-in-the-middle attacks and possible countermeasures. The new feature is currently available as an experimental add-on from the Account Manager homepage.

(crve)