[cap-talk] Google Chrome - web browser with sandboxed rendering

[David-Sarah Hopwood]

Raoul Duke wrote:
>>> [assuming they should know or care about what POP is] then we should
>>> not show that dialog box but instead just of course do the secure
>>> thing. such ability is empirically not accomplished with current
>>> systems.
>> How do we know it is a POP connection? If the application claims to
>> need to use some advanced version of POP your OS doesn't support, then
>> what?
> 
> personally i think:
> 
> ideally the user should not have to know what kind of connection it
> is, other than at worst they understand it might enable them to get to
> the email resource. this goes back to the horrible divide between what
> a user is thinking about when they are trying to do something vs. what
> it actually takes to get it done with most computing systems today.

I don't actually see that having to specify an email protocol manually
(from, in practice, two alternatives -- POP3 and IMAP) is very high on
the list of things that are irritatingly complicated about current
computing systems.

We definitely don't want to fix a single protocol. Competition between
protocols is good. In practice the user has to be instructed by their
ISP on how to fill in the server/account details, so one extra field
is neither here nor there. I'd be more concerned about the effect
on usability of the user having to remember which username and password
goes with which account. That has caused me hours of aggravation (and
phone calls to premium-rate tech support lines); it is *always* a hassle
when switching ISPs.

In any case, we do not have to solve the email account autoconfiguration
problem at the same time as trying to decide how to authorize access
to an account by a mail user agent. It's probably impossible to do that
while still being compatible with everyone's existing email set-ups.
A dialog that looks like the configuration UI in existing user agents,
as I suggested earlier in the thread, is fine. Making the configuration
simpler is somebody else's longer-term problem.

(We seem to have got a bit stuck on the example of email, but note that
the approach I suggested works for any account-based protocol.)

-- 
David-Sarah Hopwood