Mozilla drops Persona/browser id?

[Hugo Roy]

Hi,

Just saw this,
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/08/mozilla-stops-developing-its-persona-sign-in-system-because-of-low-adoption/

Maybe browser id needs its own home somewhere in spite of
mozilla’s decision.

Best,

--
Hugo Roy, Free Software Foundation Europe, <www.fsfe.org>
Deputy Coordinator, FSFE Legal Team, <www.fsfe.org/legal>
Coordinator, FSFE French Team, <www.fsfe.org/fr>

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[Paul Frazee]

I was disappointed to see this as well, as I had planned to use Persona in a new project, and always appreciated its design. For what it's worth, from my perspective, Persona was still in an adoption-growth phase, though it was slow.

They mention that Mozilla hopes a community will take control of the project. I'd like to see that as well.

Be well,

pfrazee

[David Kettler]

I think it's far too early to write off Persona as abandoned-- it has strong community support and Mozilla has said they will continue to maintain it from a stability perspective. All they have done is announced that they will not, for the next year at least, be adding any new functionality. In my mind, Persona is already as featureful as I would want it, and I'm excited for the identity team's forays into Firefox Accounts or whatever they're calling it :-)

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[Paul Frazee]

Good point, that puts me more at ease

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[Nick Jennings]

On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 1:13 AM, David Kettler <david.b...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think it's far too early to write off Persona as abandoned-- it has strong community support and Mozilla has said they will continue to maintain it from a stability perspective. All they have done is announced that they will not, for the next year at least, be adding any new functionality. In my mind, Persona is already as featureful as I would want it, and I'm excited for the identity team's forays into Firefox Accounts or whatever they're calling it :-)

Out of curiosity, what about Firefox Accounts do you find interesting? To me it seems like just another account and company hosting your data. But maybe I'm missing something?

Persona, on the other hand, is really a great (and often misunderstood) service that can be a self-hosted identity system not reliant on Mozilla servers at all, or a hosted service for those that don't want or have the means to host it themselves. I do hope that adoption continues and it does not become another failed distributed identity system.

[Leen Besselink]

On Sun, Mar 09, 2014 at 09:29:11PM +0100, Nick Jennings wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 1:13 AM, David Kettler <david.b...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > I think it's far too early to write off Persona as abandoned-- it has
> > strong community support and Mozilla has said they will continue to
> > maintain it from a stability perspective. All they have done is announced
> > that they will not, for the next year at least, be adding any new
> > functionality. In my mind, Persona is already as featureful as I would want
> > it, and I'm excited for the identity team's forays into Firefox Accounts or
> > whatever they're calling it :-)
> >
>
> Out of curiosity, what about Firefox Accounts do you find interesting? To
> me it seems like just another account and company hosting your data. But
> maybe I'm missing something?
>

The good thing about Firefox Sync (not really sure what Firefox Accounts will be like) is:
All the data is encrypted before it is uploaded.

It doesn't matter where it is stored, they can't get access to the data.

With the old version you could run your own server as well, if you wanted to.

They also had the plan to supporting other HTTP protocols, so you don't need a special server anymore.
Thus you would be able to store it on a server that supports WebDAV or on Dropbox.

It's all a bit in flux right now, but it will remain encrypted.

Why are they doing that ? On of the reasons is: Mozilla doesn't want to deal with police and so on
asking for the data. They also want to prevent Mozilla being a target for cybercriminals.

This makes them kind of unique, if you ask me.

I think the problem they had with Firefox Accounts, is that Firefox Accounts will be used for Firefox Sync
which deals with the profile.

Which makes it hard to bootstrap with Persona, the Persona model doesn't really fit well for that usecase.

I heared they will be using code, sharing libraries, from Persona for Firefox Accounts.

> Persona, on the other hand, is really a great (and often misunderstood)
> service that can be a self-hosted identity system not reliant on Mozilla
> servers at all, or a hosted service for those that don't want or have the
> means to host it themselves. I do hope that adoption continues and it does
> not become another failed distributed identity system.
>

You too can help if you want it to succeed. :-)

The biggest problem for adoption, I think, most of the time the branding was 'Persona', but at least the button
now says: 'sign up or sign in with email' or something along those lines.

It might look like an email address, but that is just because that is what you need for a federated identity.

And sending links to email addresses is also the fallback they use if your account isn't tied to a BrowserID Identity provider.

But if you run your own identity system, you can decide how you authenticate your users.

[Leen Besselink]

I should add:

I've not seen any slow down in the development of native support for BrowserID/Persona in Firefox. FirefoxOS already supports
it.

Work on making it possible to support BrowserID/Persona authentication for WebRTC doesn't seem to have stalled either.

Which makes this possible:

https://air.mozilla.org/intern-presentation-seys/