Technology All The Way

Google has been making several changes to the Chrome OS lately. The most recent one has been the idea of moving the user login feature from the machine to the browser. Yes, the browser is seemingly becoming the most important part of not only a person's online identity but also of his own local machine as well.

There have been several other login features available from third parties like Facebook and Twitter that enable you to manage your online identity so that you dont have to login using a different account for each website that you visit. Google Friend Connect is also one of the big players in the arena whose services enable you to log into several websites and for posting and receiving comments and messages.

Before this model came into picture, websites were left to their own resources to implement the login mechanism. Considering the ubiquitous nature of the 'login' module, it seems rational to have a single login that can be used in several places for which websites wont have to reimplement the functionality.

But the system has its pros and cons. Pros are the ease with which you can use your pre-existing identity on the internet anywhere it is acceptable. But, having your identity being managed in the hands of a single company will always be a cause for concern. With the world moving towards cloud computing, the risk becomes eve higher because attackers will now have to direct their attacks only to the cloud, and everytime that they succeed in doing so, they will gain access to enormous amounts of information of an even more large amount of users that is normally not accessibe if only a few pc's are compromised.

The Chromium login feature enable you to use your google/open id and a few other email id vendor login id's to be used. This means that you an log into any machine that has the chromium OS with your user id and it would behave in exactly the same way as it does on your local home pc. It is clear that the ease that it would bring to ordinary internet users will be greatly appreciated. But then, i remember a line from Spiderman - 'With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility'. Today Google is willing to take that responsibility. But today does not last forever. Its not only Google that is working on this feature. Mozilla is also trying hard to cope up with the changing facets of the web. You can see here to get a glimpse of what might be happening at Mozilla's end.

For now, we just hope everything works out just fine. There will be a lot of bumps on the road, but the vehicle of the internet will have to move ahead.