David Recordon writes on the O’Reilly Radar blog that after the address bar and search box (navigation), identity is the most important other thing for a browser to know. Except he said it better:
Google Chrome did a smart thing: Less. They unified the search box and address bar, since that’s what people do anyway. That gives us back precious pixels for the only thing that’s as important to an average web user as where they’re going: Who they are. Identity belongs in the browser.
He credits Chris Messina with giving him the food for thought that resulted in this compelling vision:
Imagine if your web browser really knew who you were on the web. Just as you login to your computer, what if when you fired up your browser, it said “Hello Dave” and asked you to “unlock it” as well (Chris Messina was quite influential in my thinking about it this way). In doing so you become securely logged into your OpenID provider (or maybe more than one of them) and as you move around the web your browser takes care of automatically logging you into the sites that you want to be, asking you about others, and helping you register with new ones using your OpenID. Argue as much as you want about the details in making this happen, but I think it’s hard to disagree that making it easier for people to manage and use their identity (or identities) online is a bad thing.
It’s not all pie-in-the-sky: He notes that “Today, MySpace, Flock and Vidoop released a prototype of their implementation toward this vision with OpenID for Flock.”
Where do I sign up?