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The main problem with Persona was not the tech, Persona is great and works well. The problem is that building federated identity services is hard. Persona is no
by soapdog 11y ago
The main problem with Persona was not the tech, Persona is great and works well. The problem is that building federated identity services is hard. Persona is not a centralized login system such as "login with Facebook". With Persona, once you decide to login with your email account, first Persona looks for an IdP with your domain/provider, the if not found it goes back to the persona catchall service. For a while gmail.com had support for Persona as well and it worked transparently. I don't know if that is still the case.
What killed Persona was not tech but the lack of traction. Developers loved it but failed to use it. By providing options such as FB, Google, Twitter and other logins, the user choose the familiar service and never tried Persona. In the end, the lack of traction together with the overall difficulty of building federated identity services killed it.
But what is dead cannot die! Persona still works, I still use it every day in lots of Mozilla properties and if I had to build some service that required logins, I would use it even today. It is in the hand of the community but with some care and more traction this can become cool again.
I will look into the source code and see if I can help somewhere.
- smacktoward 11y ago> With Persona, once you decide to login with your email account, first Persona looks for an IdP with your domain/provider, the if not found it goes back to the persona catchall service. This implies a classic chicken/egg dilemma: email providers won't implement Persona support unless that would be useful for lots of people; Persona wouldn't be useful for lots of people until their email provider supported it.
- soapdog 11y agoIt worked even if their email provider didn't supported it because in such cases there was a fallback Mozilla IdP. You can try it right now on MDN or MozillaWiki.
- deno 11y ago> What killed Persona was not tech but the lack of traction. Developers loved it but failed to use it. The idea was always that Mozilla would ship native integration in Firefox. There were very very pretty mockups going around and everyone was holding their breath for that to happen.[1] Even announcing they would ship it in the next version would mean 1) it’s stable now and 2) Mozilla is behind it. My guess is Google (their sponsor at that time) made them drop it because they were preparing to launch G+. I know it’s a conspiracy theory, but it frankly makes more sense than all those other non-reasons I keep hearing about in this thread. [1] http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/firefox-account-manager.jpg http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/firefo...
- Flimm 11y agoI agree. Some people in this thread are saying Persona is not dead because it's still up... but without the browser integration (which never was arrived), it's not even half as good as what it could be, and without Mozilla endorsement, it's not going to get serious adoption.