What is it with services now separating username and password fields?

redballooon@lemm.ee to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 318 points –

Back in the old times, on the sites I log in regularly, my browser filled in both username and password. I clicked "Log in" once, and I was set to go.

But no more. Now it's all first a username, then a password. From what I saw, Apple started this many years ago, but now this bother really spread. And it's not like I can just double-click on the same screen area, oh no. Animations make sure that I have to wait several hundred milliseconds before the password field is there, and depending on the site, I even have to select from my browser, which login I want to use, twice!

Why, oh why?

All my screens are really big enough to display 2 text fields. What are arguments for this behavior? I don't see any.

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Federation. Your email address could either be local creds, or federated with google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, etc.

When you submit your email address, it determines how you will be authenticating when you submit it.

That could be done after the user enters both the email/username and password

Edit: sorry, I think I misunderstood what you said, but if someone is using something like "sign in with google", we've had separate buttons for that for ages.

I think it might solve the problem that people often don't remember if they created their account using SSO or with an email/password combo. So the site looks up your email to see what login method you use in order to redirect you to the proper prompt.

Yes, with a limited set of federations you can have the user make that choice beforehand. But sometimes the options are changing all the time and/or you don't want to announce all the services you're federating with, or it wouldn't make sense anyway.