Mozilla is about to make life much easier for everyone buying things on the web.
Mozilla is currently developing a new JavaScript API, first appearing in the Firefox OS, which aims to make it easier for people to make payments for digital goods and services on the web. This will be done by either using a credit card or by adding the purchase to the users’ monthly carrier bills.
Firefox OS engineer Kumar McMillan revealed the information in a Mozilla blog stating that navigator.mozPay() is actually based on Google Wallet's API. However, it is modified for multiple payment providers, alongside carrier billing.
When a web app calls to the API, a "secure window with a concise UI" will pop up on the user’s phone and will need his or her authentication with a password, and the payment gets processed accordingly.
“There are services to mitigate a lot of these complications such as PayPal, Stripe, and others but they aren’t integrated into web devices very well. Mozilla wants to introduce a common web API to make payments easy and secure on web devices yet still as flexible as the checkout button for merchants.” McMillan writes.
He also says that "the web should support businesses of all kinds and payments should be a first class feature of the web."
“Mozilla plans to work with other vendors through the W3C to reach consensus on a common API that supports web payments in the best way possible. After shipping in Firefox OS, Mozilla plans to add navigator.mozPay() to Firefox for Android and desktop Firefox,” McMillan adds.
While McMillan emphasizes that Mozilla's new API is still in the experimental stages and could "change drastically" without prior notice, it will be shipping with the first Firefox OS devices.
