745869 - BrowserID module

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Add-on SDK Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Erik Vold]

I haven't thought this through, but I think a BrowserID module would be pretty useful, and I don't think it should be a 3rd party module.

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

What would it do?

Comment 2

[Erik Vold]

Well I'm thinking that an addon could store data for different browserIDs, and the addon dev could have a server that syncs the data based on those browserIDs.  I may not understand browserID well enough though.

Say I made a bookmark addon, and I wanted bookmarks associated to specific browserIDs, so that I could have all of my bookmarks at home, but just the ones for work at the office.

Comment 3

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Interesting. I think the first thing that springs to mind is we should have a module that supports syncing custom data directly, that seems like the more obvious first step to me.

Comment 4

[Jeff Griffiths (:canuckistani) (:⚡︎)]

I think there are two pieces with two distinct use cases:

* Firefox sync should sync prefs and simple-storage data for add-ons. Does it do this already? I have no idea!

* if I had a start-up that allowed people to store data & files in it via browser integration ( let's call this start-up 4evah-Note ), I might want to support Persona as my SSO system. I would then either have to implement Persona myself, get a 3rd party modules that adds it, or I might be pretty pleased if the SDK already supported it out of the box.

I guess the work-flow might be that the add-on requires a login, and provides all the standard Persona dialogs for logging in, etc. It would also have to maintain a session.

Comment 5

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

> * Firefox sync should sync prefs and simple-storage data for add-ons. Does
> it do this already? I have no idea!
There's a whitelist of preferences that are synced out of the box. If you want to sync other prefs, you have to add them to the whitelist by creating another pref in a specific format. (don't remember the format offhand and I'm not in a position to look it up on my phone)
Simple-storage would probably require us to create a "addon data" sync engine that Sync can use in addition to bookmarks, history, etc.

> * if I had a start-up that allowed people to store data & files in it via
> browser integration ( let's call this start-up 4evah-Note ), I might want to
> support Persona as my SSO system. I would then either have to implement
> Persona myself, get a 3rd party modules that adds it, or I might be pretty
> pleased if the SDK already supported it out of the box.
A lot of this might come out of the box once Persona gets built in to Firefox itself. Maybe we should get some input from the Identity team before we get too far ahead of ourselves?

Comment 6

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Jetpack Bugmaster) from comment #5)
> > * Firefox sync should sync prefs and simple-storage data for add-ons. Does
> > it do this already? I have no idea!
> There's a whitelist of preferences that are synced out of the box. If you
> want to sync other prefs, you have to add them to the whitelist by creating
> another pref in a specific format. (don't remember the format offhand and
> I'm not in a position to look it up on my phone)
> Simple-storage would probably require us to create a "addon data" sync
> engine that Sync can use in addition to bookmarks, history, etc.

Yeah I think this is a separate issue that needs its own bug for investigation.

> > * if I had a start-up that allowed people to store data & files in it via
> > browser integration ( let's call this start-up 4evah-Note ), I might want to
> > support Persona as my SSO system. I would then either have to implement
> > Persona myself, get a 3rd party modules that adds it, or I might be pretty
> > pleased if the SDK already supported it out of the box.
> A lot of this might come out of the box once Persona gets built in to
> Firefox itself. Maybe we should get some input from the Identity team before
> we get too far ahead of ourselves?

For sure, having use cases like this to talk about helps that discussion no end though :)

Comment 7

[Erik Vold]

Here is another use case:

Say that I use my browserID for bugzilla, so I don't have a user/pass stored in the password manager for bugzilla.mozilla.org, so how would an addon like https://github.com/autonome/Github-Bugzilla-Tweaks work?

Comment 8

[David Mason [:dcm :dmason]]

Erik,

First, instead of this bug - would you be willing to write a Feature page on this? We use those primarily for tracking new features. You can use the form linked to with "Create new feature page" here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features - you only need to fill in the red portions - but feel free to fill in any portion

There are a couple of things to consider here: 1) the sync team is going to change quite a bit to link up with the browserid work so that its based on browserid (and easier to set up). In addition, what is synced will grow. 2) as we land the jetpack loader and APIs into Firefox itself, it will be easier for the other elements of moz to expose their apis as well. 

The use-cases are great, and with the previous things in mind, a feature page can be fleshed out more by other jetpack guys and we can figure where it fits in the roadmap.

I'm going to close this bug for that to happen - then we can open implementation bugs for the actual work.

Comment 9

[Erik Vold]

(In reply to David Mason [:dcm :dmason] from comment #8)

Sure that sounds good, give me a few weeks though, because I'd like to send the BrowserID guys some questions if I can't find answers in their documents.