July 2019
The Account Chooser Working Group has agreed to close.
The original charter was to explore and standardize new user interface experiences for the login process. The working group developed accountchooser.com, a service that would help users login by storing their different email accounts on the local device and then using those entries to bootstrap the login process at different web sites.
While the use of accountchooser.com never became popular for a large number of web sites, the UX pattern that it pioneered is now common on major sites like Google, Facebook and others. Ultimately, the working group decided that this pattern is best implemented by browser and platform developers instead of as open source javascript.
The accountchooser.com javascript tool will continue to operate normally through July 31, 2020. After that date, accountchooser.com will operate in “universal opt-out” mode, mimicking the behavior of users who choose to opt out of the service. This means that it will provide no value to web sites but will not break. On August 1, 2021, accountchooser.com will return 404 errors to any sites that integrate with it.
Applications that want to continue using this feature can host and run it themselves by downloading the source code.