Comment by dane-pgp

> I also wonder why nobody has tried it since.

For what it's worth, the vision does live on and people are working on developing web standards that get us closer towards it. One example is the W3C's "Credential Management Level 1" from 2019, which specifically references[0] Mozilla's work:

"The API defined here does the bare minimum to expose user agent’s credential managers to the web, and allows the web to help those credential managers understand when federated identity providers are in use. The next logical step will be along the lines sketched in documents like [WEB-LOGIN] (and, to some extent, Mozilla’s BrowserID [BROWSERID])."

More recently, in fact, today, I see there is a "Federated Credential Management API" draft published,[1] which has the goal of:

"enabling a website to request a users [sic] federated credentials from a user agent, and to help the user agent store the users [sic] federated credentials for future use."

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/credential-management-1/#teh-futur

[1] https://wicg.github.io/FedCM/