proposed navigator.mozPay() changes

Hi all.

As you may or may not know, ever since Mozilla began working on navigator.mozPay the feedback we've mainly received is "why does the web need a payment API?" Their argument is that you can already do payments on the web via standard HTTPS and forms. I.E. you can process credit cards on the web already and you can already set up operator billing on the mobile web. 

The mozPay API was made for Firefox OS. As with everything else in Firefox OS we 1) moved really really fast and 2) we focused on only adding *new* APIs that mobile apps didn't already have in HTML5. The mozPay API grew more into an experimental sandbox for Mozilla because we kinda knew that we wanted some additional features around security and carrier billing but we weren't totally sure what we needed.

After shipping devices and getting a lot of feedback on the API, we started to take a step back and see what the *web* would really need for payments that it doesn't already have. We identified some things around operator billing but the mozPay API seemed to introduce too tight of an end to end flow for this. Thus, I am proposing to deprecate mozPay in favor of more specific primitives. This should allow any payment provider on the web to gain operator billing functionality. 

I just posted a request for feedback on this proposal: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.webapi/cyk8Nz4I-f4 (https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapi)

I know that the PaySwarm group (and BitCoin folks) have some different use cases than Mozilla does. They overlap in some places. Since my proposal would result in a major shift from the current nav.pay() standardization effort I wanted to get some feedback from you guys on it (but mainly just wanted to inform you about it). To be clear, this is just a proposal, no API changes have been made yet.

Kumar

Received on Wednesday, 4 September 2013 21:45:00 UTC