Authentication on the web is not going anywhere until browsers implement native identity support. The constant focus on authentication and "identity providers"

Authentication on the web is not going anywhere until browsers implement native identity support. The constant focus on authentication and "identity providers" in discussing this stuff misses the fact that sites and apps, above all, are concerned with continuity: The next time I'm visiting foo.com, I'm the same person that visited yesterday. It's the good old session cookie. Right now, most sites ask you to sign up with an email address because that's the constant; but that leads to a proliferation of accounts strewn across the Internet, each with its own password and identity data. On the other hand, the whole idea of authenticating through a third-party provider such as Google just centralizes identity with what ends up being a very small pool of select providers, because nobody wants to show 42 different "login in with..." buttons. But all we really want is that browser can prove (cryptographically) to foo.com that I'm "user #2048203", and foo.com can prove that it is privy to that information. foo.com shouldn't get anything but a opaque identifier, and anything else it wants (my email, my name, my address) can be divulged through an API dedicated to this purpose. The whole login problem was derailed because of authorization ("site foo.com wants to access your contacts"), which OAuth was originally designed for, was abused for authentication. But authorization is a completely orthogonal use case, and it's a fairly limited compared to login; I authorize an app maybe once a month, but I login every day. We don't need or want Google or Twitter or any third-party authority to manage our identities. What we do need is to be able to store our sets of identities somewhere so that all our devices can share them — Apple could offer that through iCloud, for example, and browsers could easily give you different options. Apple already invented ApplePay, which is exactly this for payments. Isn't anyone working on something like this for login?