Sxipper

» see sxipper.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

sxipper was the kind of thing openid true believers installed on firefox in 2008 to prove that the browser itself could be your identity layer. i was on the mainstream msn plus gmail login stack that year and had no openid provider account anywhere. openid true believers were mostly american and canadian identity researchers writing long blog posts on identityblog.com and kim cameron's laws of identity. i was reading donanimhaber and coding class assignments.

the tool itself came out of sxip identity, a vancouver company dick hardt founded in 2003. hardt gave the famous identity 2.0 talk at oscon 2005, a slide deck with a hundred words that got quoted for years as a bookend to the whole federated-identity moment. sxip built one commercial identity broker product for enterprises, and it built sxipper as the consumer-facing showcase. sxipper handled openid negotiation for you and filled login forms with per-site personas you could switch between.

by mid-2008 the parent company was in trouble. techcrunch declared sxip identity deadpooled on 22 may 2008 after acquisition attempts by google and microsoft went nowhere. hardt announced on 9 december 2008 that he was joining microsoft as a partner architect, while staying on the sxipper inc board to keep the extension alive. the extension itself limped through updates for another two years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

sxipper occupied a specific gap in the browser stack. the openid handshake required you to type a url as your identifier and then bounce through a provider login page before approving the release of your profile back to the site that asked. the whole flow was slow and hard for civilians. sxipper wrapped that in a firefox toolbar button that filled forms with saved personas and handled the redirect dance in the background.

the pitch was that if the ux of openid could be made painless, more sites would accept it, and the whole federated identity dream could stop being an rfc curiosity and become an actual login pattern. that pitch was reasonable in 2007. it turned out wrong. openid never crossed the mainstream because most consumers already had accounts on google or facebook, and the sites that mattered would accept those provider logins directly without the openid url syntax in the middle. sign in with facebook launched in 2010 and closed off the runway for good.

~ the decline ~

by 2009 sxipper had stopped receiving meaningful feature updates. maintenance releases fixed firefox compatibility for the 3.x line but no roadmap was visible. the crunchbase profile stopped updating. the sxip identity company page went stale. sxipper inc kept the domain resolving and the add-on downloadable, but the team had scattered. hardt was at microsoft doing his own work on federated identity.

firefox 4 shipped 22 march 2011 with a rewritten extension api on the way, and the existing sxipper build silently broke. mozilla support forum threads from that spring show users reporting the extension no longer loaded and asking whether a fix was coming. no fix was ever coming. the add-on page came down at some point after that and the crunchbase entry got marked closed. what was left of sxipper inc quietly wound down without a public shutdown announcement.

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