Meeting Mozilla
Many of you might have heard about Mozilla being invited to come to Redmond to spend some times with various teams around Microsoft. The overarching goal of Mozilla's visit is to ensure that Mozilla's users have a great experience when running Firefox and Thunderbird on Vista and for us here at Microsoft to listen to the Mozilla team and improve our platform and technologies.
We in the CardSpace team were excited to learn of Mozilla's visit because it would give us an opportunity to re-engage with Mozilla and, now that we're very close to releasing CardSpace, discuss how Firefox in particular might support CardSpace today and other identity selectors in the future. We (Mike, Garrett and yours truly) really enjoyed meeting with the Mozilla guys and greatly appreciate their focus and insightful understanding of the importance of the Identity Metasystem.
Vladimir Vukićević, one of the guys at Mozilla responsible for Mozilla's graphical rendering engine has been blogging about his experiences (part1, part2, part3). In his part3 entry, he has this to say about meeting with some of the CardSpace guys (Mike Jones, Garrett Serack and yours truly):
We started off with a presentation from the CardSpace team about, appropriately, CardSpace. It was a pretty compelling demo, especially when they clarified that there is only a small amount of extra bits needed to enable CardSpace identity checking for a web site — you don't need any WS goop in the browser, and only a tiny amount on the server for which there are a bunch of implementations. The CardSpace interface in Vista looks pretty good, though we're hoping that open implementations like Higgins will become available very soon as inspectable open alternatives. Since this is done through an object tag, a simple browser plugin that integrates with Higgins or with CardSpace should cover most non-IE browsers out there, so I'm interested to see what happens.
So, before you ask "when will Firefox support CardSpace?", bear with us while we explore options. I'll post updates as and when we progress.
