Tag: Persona

Mozilla is Shutting Down Persona This Year

Back in 2012, Mozilla launched Persona, am ambitious plan to replace passwords and attempt to provide a single sign-in solution for the web. It didn’t quite work out.

Mozilla revealed that it’s shutting it down this year.

You can see a message from Mozilla’s Ryan Kelly here. It begins:

When the Mozilla Identity team transitioned Persona to community
ownership, we committed resources to operational and security support
throughout 2014 [1], and renewed that commitment for 2015 [2]. Due to
low, declining usage, we are reallocating the project’s dedicated,
ongoing resources and will shut down the persona.org services that we run.

Persona.org and related domains will be taken offline on November 30th,
2016.

If you run a website that relies on Persona, you will need to implement
an alternative login solution for your users. We have assembled a wiki
page with additional information and guidelines for migration [3], but
here are the important things you need to know…

In a FAQ, Mozilla says its metrics show that usage of persona.org is low, and hasn’t grown over the last two years.

More on the shut-down here.

Image via Mozilla

January 12, 2016
Mozilla’s Persona Now Supports Gmail Users

Persona began as a browser customization option in Firefox, but Mozilla soon used the name for its ambitious new plan to make the Web more secure. In short, it’s a single identity that’s used across all of the Web sites you frequent, and it’s secure as it only requires an email address. Gmail wasn’t initially supported at launch, but that all changed this week.

Mozilla announced on Thursday that its Persona ID system now supports Gmail. In other words, you can sign into your favorite Persona-enabled Web sites with nothing but your Gmail email address. With the addition of Gmail, Mozilla says that Persona now natively supports 700 million email users.

As an added bonus, Mozilla reveals that Persona will protect your privacy, even from Google. The non-profit says that Google can’t track which sites you sign into via Gmail for Persona.

If you want to try out Persona right now to see what all the hubbub is about, check out any of Mozilla’s sites. They all support Persona.

August 9, 2013
Mozilla Releases Persona To The Public

Do you remember Mozilla’s ambitious plan to replace passwords? It’s called Persona, and it promised to be a single sign-in solution across the entire Internet. It’s been in the works for a while now, but Mozilla is ready to share it with the world.

Mozilla announced that Persona is now available in beta to everyone. It works in all major browsers, and is easily integrated. In fact, Mozilla hopes that Web sites across the Web begin to implement Persona as an easier way to handle log-ins.

Here’s a preview of what you can expect from Persona:

Mozilla points out that Persona is still a work in progress. With that being said, they’ve made tremendous progress on the project over the past year. From the time that the name was changed from BrowserID to Persona, they have created a new API and streamlined the first-time user experience. They also added support for showing a site’s name and logo, alongside links to the site’s privacy policy in the login dialog.

What may be most attractive to Web sites is that Persona can coexist alongside existing login methods. It’s similar to how Web sites can offer traditional email and password logins alongside Facebook and Twitter logins. Mozilla’s Persona aims to be a more secure version of those specialized logins.

To show the potential of Persona, Mozilla has partnered with The Times to illustrate how Persona can be used for cross platform logins. In essence, a user can begin The Times crossword at home on desktop and continue the same crossword on a mobile device later in the day as long as they sign in via Persona.

Interested developers can start integrating Persona into their Web sites right now. You can grab the documentation here. It’s also an open cource project so you can grab the source code at github.

September 28, 2012