4 ms·

I'm really sad Persona got abandoned so quickly. Mozilla made some strange decisions in how it marketed and supported it, too: "Persona" was already the name o

by acabal 11y ago

I'm really sad Persona got abandoned so quickly. Mozilla made some strange decisions in how it marketed and supported it, too: "Persona" was already the name of their browser themeing engine (or was it the other way around?), I don't remember there being a Chrome or IE plugin for it, I don't think any of the Mozilla-branded sites (like addons.mozilla.org) ever used it, and after just a year it got unceremoniously dumped. Everyone I talked to said it was a great solution and they were really interested to see where it would go. Why did Mozilla make so many weird decisions on what could have been a revolutionary technology? Is there any way to breathe life back in to it? When it came out I personally considered implementing it for Scribophile , but decided not to because I didn't want to invest a lot of time in an unproven technology. If I had seen it active and lively a few years down the road, I would have been more than happy to bite the bullet. Maybe my attitude was a common one, and doomed Persona to a chicken-and-egg situation. Who knows.

callahad 11y ago
> I don't think any of the Mozilla-branded sites ever used it You're right that AMO never used Persona, but a ton of Mozilla's other sites used (and still use) it. MDN, Bugzilla, Etherpad, the Firefox Marketplace, most of our metrics dashboards, etc. It wasn't a complete sweep, but we did see pretty solid internal adoption. > after just a year it got unceremoniously dumped. Longer than that. I think Lloyd and Mike hashed out the first version of the protocol back in March 2011. The bulk of the team came together around March 2012. Most of us were moved off the project in around November 2013, so we had closer to two years as an official project. ...wow, it really felt longer than that. > I didn't want to invest a lot of time in an unproven technology. That was a big reason we didn't go further than we did. People loved the idea, but relatively few folks were willing to actually back up that belief with action. We also share some of the blame: We thought we had more time to experiment with the core protocol and product design, but with Mozilla Labs' somewhat sudden dissolution, we were unexpectedly asked to demonstrate traction and commercial adoption that simply wasn't there.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Dan, I know you are not to blame for this but I hope you can at least forward the sentiment. I was at MozFest last year, with one of the execs on stage talking about Mozilla's efforts to "free the web". He went on and on for 15 minutes about it and I swear, the only thing on my mind at the time was how Persona had been gutted. Today's web isn't "free" if a core part of it is behind Facebook and Twitter. > People loved the idea, but relatively few folks were willing to actually back up that belief with action. Either Mozilla is full of it when they say they fight for the free web, or they massively misunderstand how important it is to get rid of proprietary authentication. If this is Mozilla's stance, Mozilla's belief, then Mozilla is the one not backing it up with action. Edit: Followup thoughts: I cannot get behind the way Persona was dumped. Firefox had an atrocious market share for many years, but devs didn't dump it. Persona can't revolutionize the web by taking down Facebook and Twitter in 24 months, and it's not good enough? Grr, there were at least a dozen other ways to stop spending as much effort on it without outright killing it. > Maybe my attitude was a common one, and doomed Persona to a chicken-and-egg situation. Yuuuup: https://bazqux.uservoice.com/forums/190752-general/suggestions/4832985-allow-authentication-via-mozilla-persona https://bazqux.uservoice.com/forums/190752-general/suggestio...
  - callahad 11y ago
    In these cases it's really helpful to recognize the distinction between the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo), the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo), and the broader, open source Mozilla project that binds everyone together. The non-profit Mozilla Foundation exists to support the project, and does truly wonderful, pure work on keeping the Web open. Advocacy, education, grants, etc. They also own the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, which is in trenches directly competing with other browser vendors to ensure that the project has sufficient influence to fulfill its mission. Persona was housed in MoCo, which afforded it greater resources at the cost of greater organizational risk. > Either Mozilla is full of it when they say they fight for the free web, or they massively misunderstand how important it is to get rid of proprietary authentication. The Mozilla project is too small to fight effectively on every front; we have to focus on areas of greatest urgency and where we have the greatest leverage. In the instance of Persona, two major things changed: (1) Persona became less urgent, and (2) we discovered that we couldn't credibly leverage Firefox to boost Persona adoption. To the first point, back in 2012 we were seeing huge startups, including Spotify and Pinterest, run without offering any means of authentication besides Facebook Connect. The lack of traditional authentication on these sites looked like an ill omen for the freedom of the future Web, but that didn't come to pass. Both sites now offer email-based authentication in addition to Facebook Connect. It's not as slick as it would have been with Persona, but the immediate threat to user autonomy isn't there anymore. If I had to guess, it seems like the tide started turning in late 2012 / early 2013, around the time of Mailchimp's "Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It" blog post at http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/ http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-i.... Secondly, Persona's passwordless design wasn't suitable for use in Firefox Accounts, the development of which had become quite urgent. So not only could we not use Firefox Sync / Accounts to boost Persona's active userbase, the Persona team suddenly found itself with domain knowledge that was quite valuable to the Accounts and Sync efforts. Oops. :) That said, just because we're not fighting as visibly on this front doesn't mean we're out of the fight altogether. Firefox Accounts has an active userbase orders of magnitude larger than Persona's. We may be able to reintroduce a notion of federated identity into FxA at some point in the future, which would help us break out of the "three-way cold start" that Persona faced. But that's all hypothetical. If anyone wants to run with these ideas, do it! For the sake of longevity, I'd recommend any spiritual successors to either establish themselves within independent foundations, or design the protocol without the sort of centralized bootstrapping that Persona had.
nickbauman 11y ago
> I don't remember there being a Chrome or IE plugin for it It never needed them. It was designed to work without them. I agree, it was great.
onli 11y ago
> Is there any way to breathe life back in to it? At least it is still absolutely possible to use it. The servers are up, the code is working, even the gmail-integration still works. Not even I would advocate to use it as the main option on a user-facing site, but maybe as an additional option if the site tries to support everything anyways? I have a few personal projects (music-streamer, feedreader, blogengine) that all use it to login, as the only option. It's the only thing simple enough to add without having to store passwords. Serendipity has a plugin to use it to login to the admin backend, same seems to be true for wordpress. It may be a zombie, but it is walking one. Maybe that is the way to keep it alive and give others a chance to pick it up. If not, at least I had some years of having the login-problem solved for myself with almost no work required.
Shorel 11y ago
'Persona' has other meaning in Spanish, in a way that makes it hard to market for any Spanish speaking country.
CaptSpify 11y ago
I remember hearing people were super-excited about it, and I kept thinking "It's a theme-customizer for your web-browser. Neat, but why is everyone going crazy for it? What's the big deal?" Sadly, I never looked into it to find out more until after it was canned.

by acabal 11y ago

callahad 11y ago

> I don't think any of the Mozilla-branded sites ever used it You're right that AMO never used Persona, but a ton of Mozilla's other sites used (and still use) it. MDN, Bugzilla, Etherpad, the Firefox Marketplace, most of our metrics dashboards, etc. It wasn't a complete sweep, but we did see pretty solid internal adoption. > after just a year it got unceremoniously dumped. Longer than that. I think Lloyd and Mike hashed out the first version of the protocol back in March 2011. The bulk of the team came together around March 2012. Most of us were moved off the project in around November 2013, so we had closer to two years as an official project. ...wow, it really felt longer than that. > I didn't want to invest a lot of time in an unproven technology. That was a big reason we didn't go further than we did. People loved the idea, but relatively few folks were willing to actually back up that belief with action. We also share some of the blame: We thought we had more time to experiment with the core protocol and product design, but with Mozilla Labs' somewhat sudden dissolution, we were unexpectedly asked to demonstrate traction and commercial adoption that simply wasn't there.

scrollaway 11y ago
Dan, I know you are not to blame for this but I hope you can at least forward the sentiment. I was at MozFest last year, with one of the execs on stage talking about Mozilla's efforts to "free the web". He went on and on for 15 minutes about it and I swear, the only thing on my mind at the time was how Persona had been gutted. Today's web isn't "free" if a core part of it is behind Facebook and Twitter. > People loved the idea, but relatively few folks were willing to actually back up that belief with action. Either Mozilla is full of it when they say they fight for the free web, or they massively misunderstand how important it is to get rid of proprietary authentication. If this is Mozilla's stance, Mozilla's belief, then Mozilla is the one not backing it up with action. Edit: Followup thoughts: I cannot get behind the way Persona was dumped. Firefox had an atrocious market share for many years, but devs didn't dump it. Persona can't revolutionize the web by taking down Facebook and Twitter in 24 months, and it's not good enough? Grr, there were at least a dozen other ways to stop spending as much effort on it without outright killing it. > Maybe my attitude was a common one, and doomed Persona to a chicken-and-egg situation. Yuuuup: https://bazqux.uservoice.com/forums/190752-general/suggestions/4832985-allow-authentication-via-mozilla-persona https://bazqux.uservoice.com/forums/190752-general/suggestio...
- callahad 11y ago
  In these cases it's really helpful to recognize the distinction between the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo), the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo), and the broader, open source Mozilla project that binds everyone together. The non-profit Mozilla Foundation exists to support the project, and does truly wonderful, pure work on keeping the Web open. Advocacy, education, grants, etc. They also own the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, which is in trenches directly competing with other browser vendors to ensure that the project has sufficient influence to fulfill its mission. Persona was housed in MoCo, which afforded it greater resources at the cost of greater organizational risk. > Either Mozilla is full of it when they say they fight for the free web, or they massively misunderstand how important it is to get rid of proprietary authentication. The Mozilla project is too small to fight effectively on every front; we have to focus on areas of greatest urgency and where we have the greatest leverage. In the instance of Persona, two major things changed: (1) Persona became less urgent, and (2) we discovered that we couldn't credibly leverage Firefox to boost Persona adoption. To the first point, back in 2012 we were seeing huge startups, including Spotify and Pinterest, run without offering any means of authentication besides Facebook Connect. The lack of traditional authentication on these sites looked like an ill omen for the freedom of the future Web, but that didn't come to pass. Both sites now offer email-based authentication in addition to Facebook Connect. It's not as slick as it would have been with Persona, but the immediate threat to user autonomy isn't there anymore. If I had to guess, it seems like the tide started turning in late 2012 / early 2013, around the time of Mailchimp's "Social Login Buttons Aren't Worth It" blog post at http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/ http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-i.... Secondly, Persona's passwordless design wasn't suitable for use in Firefox Accounts, the development of which had become quite urgent. So not only could we not use Firefox Sync / Accounts to boost Persona's active userbase, the Persona team suddenly found itself with domain knowledge that was quite valuable to the Accounts and Sync efforts. Oops. :) That said, just because we're not fighting as visibly on this front doesn't mean we're out of the fight altogether. Firefox Accounts has an active userbase orders of magnitude larger than Persona's. We may be able to reintroduce a notion of federated identity into FxA at some point in the future, which would help us break out of the "three-way cold start" that Persona faced. But that's all hypothetical. If anyone wants to run with these ideas, do it! For the sake of longevity, I'd recommend any spiritual successors to either establish themselves within independent foundations, or design the protocol without the sort of centralized bootstrapping that Persona had.

nickbauman 11y ago

> I don't remember there being a Chrome or IE plugin for it It never needed them. It was designed to work without them. I agree, it was great.

onli 11y ago

> Is there any way to breathe life back in to it? At least it is still absolutely possible to use it. The servers are up, the code is working, even the gmail-integration still works. Not even I would advocate to use it as the main option on a user-facing site, but maybe as an additional option if the site tries to support everything anyways? I have a few personal projects (music-streamer, feedreader, blogengine) that all use it to login, as the only option. It's the only thing simple enough to add without having to store passwords. Serendipity has a plugin to use it to login to the admin backend, same seems to be true for wordpress. It may be a zombie, but it is walking one. Maybe that is the way to keep it alive and give others a chance to pick it up. If not, at least I had some years of having the login-problem solved for myself with almost no work required.

Shorel 11y ago

'Persona' has other meaning in Spanish, in a way that makes it hard to market for any Spanish speaking country.

CaptSpify 11y ago

I remember hearing people were super-excited about it, and I kept thinking "It's a theme-customizer for your web-browser. Neat, but why is everyone going crazy for it? What's the big deal?" Sadly, I never looked into it to find out more until after it was canned.