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Why we love Mozilla Persona

blog.zonino.co.uk

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Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#71

Post by kn8 »

rebelde wrote: post #58
drew wrote: post #24

In principle, Persona is great. Not storing passwords is awesome, a non-FB/Google/Twitter identity option is important. I would encourage you, though, to look carefully at your login completion metrics. I implemented Persona on my site ( http://www.sixquestions.co ) to have a pure email option and although users clearly prefer it, about 35% complete the Persona login flow successfully. That's 10 points lower than our…

Here's an example: I just failed to login to Zonino myself. I enter in the Gmail address that I use for registrations and other junk. I get the message: "Accounts don't match. You are currently signed into Google as [my normal Gmail address]. ... Force Google logout?" Forget that. I'm not interested in logging out of Gmail. Logging out of #1, into #2, out of #2 and back into #1 is more work that simple registration.…

Normally, when you're logged into multiple Google accounts - Google Bridge in Persona lets you pick which Google account you want to use. This error you're seeing seems like some sort of bug/UX issue (?) in Persona -> Google flow where if you're already signed into multiple Google accounts, but not the extra one you're trying to use - things don't work as smoothly..

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#72

Post by louthy »

I use it for http://www.4four.org and really like it.

The one small complaint I would have is that it would be great if (after initial setup) the login process was a bit faster. It should be quicker than the old-school username and password IMHO, but with the animations and latency on authentication it all seems to feel a bit sluggish. Especially as the cookie for it expires frequently - which is a bit shit for users of a forum where you're normally signed in until you decide otherwise.

This is still in my minor complaint box because I suspect there's tweaks I could do which I haven't had time to explore yet.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#73

Post by kijin »

drew wrote: post #24

In principle, Persona is great. Not storing passwords is awesome, a non-FB/Google/Twitter identity option is important. I would encourage you, though, to look carefully at your login completion metrics. I implemented Persona on my site ( http://www.sixquestions.co ) to have a pure email option and although users clearly prefer it, about 35% complete the Persona login flow successfully. That's 10 points lower than our…

Agreed. Although Persona's technical basis and privacy protections are second to none, the UX is nothing to write home about. It still feels too much like OpenID, and we know what happened to OpenID. Facebook and Twitter can get away with cross-site redirects because they're well known and people trust them. Persona doesn't have that benefit, so it can't get away with the same cumbersome UX. It needs to do better, much better. The market is unfair. Deal with it.

If you're in the business of implementing an alternative login system, you should also seriously think about what kind of UX you're competing against. Your ultimate competitor isn't Facebook or Twitter. It's the good old email-and-password login system that everyone is used to. You enter your email address, select a password, and you're in, without ever leaving the signup page! It's even easier if you use a password manager like LastPass. That's what you're competing against, and if your UX has any more steps or redirects than that, you're probably doomed.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#74

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

I don't get why persona needs its own branding... Nobody knows what persona is. It should say login with Firefox. Did fb create a new brand for its login system? No it's just login with fb, same with literally every login service except freaking persona. Use your most popular brand instead of forcing all developers to evangelize a new brand. That's just not going to freaking work.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#75

Post by cantfindmypass »

Last time I looked into persona, it was essentially unusable for my usage - there's no reasonable way to use a different email address to sign up for every site. I like to know who leaked my email address when I start getting spammed.

Edit: looks like they may have have fixed it: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-manage-my-perso...

Though I'm not sure if it remains usable with hundreds of email addresses.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#76

Post by wulczer »

darklajid wrote: post #25
ubernostrum wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this doesn't solve the issue that you're still trusting someone else with your secret (your password) If you run your own identity provider, you are only trusting yourself with your secret. Also, nothing about Persona requires password-based authentication -- you can use any mechanism you like to authenticate to your identity provider.

The problem I have with that is that I haven't found decent identity providers last time I checked. Without some decent/proven implementations I'm hesitant to use it. I don't quite like using Mozilla's service (mostly not because of trust, it just feels half-assed not to go the extra mile and is considered an intermediate workaround/solution even by Mozilla, as far as I know). Without decent options to self host I gu…

Since everyone is plugging their own: here's a identity provider daemon written in Go:

https://github.com/wulczer/persona-idp

It uses my Mail Transfer Agent to identify, so I can just use me email password to log in to Persona-enabled sites, but you can easily swap it out for a different credentials checker.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#77

Post by mintplant »

dsschnau wrote: post #59

Sounds great. I need an e-mail provider that implements the protocol? Are there any? How can I implement it on my self-hosted e-mail?

Not necessarily. If the email provider doesn't implement the protocol, it will send you an email to verify when you log in.

Thanks to Identity Bridging on the Mozilla Identity Provider, Persona can also use the APIs of supported providers to verify your identity: it can verify a Gmail address by connecting with your Google Account, and has something similar for Yahoo! Mail as well.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#78

Post by dsschnau »

mintplant wrote: post #77
dsschnau wrote: post #59

Sounds great. I need an e-mail provider that implements the protocol? Are there any? How can I implement it on my self-hosted e-mail?

Not necessarily. If the email provider doesn't implement the protocol, it will send you an email to verify when you log in. Thanks to Identity Bridging on the Mozilla Identity Provider, Persona can also use the APIs of supported providers to verify your identity: it can verify a Gmail address by connecting with your Google Account, and has something similar for Yahoo! Mail as well.

Ah, I kind of understand... Thanks for your help :)

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#79

Post by vertex-four »

talex5 wrote: post #68

I really like the idea of Persona, and it's very easy to integrate with your own site. However, it's still a bit unreliable. For example, clicking on the zonino login button just opened a mostly-blank page for me (white on the left, light grey on the right, with a pointy arrow in the middle; a bar at the bottom says "Mozilla Person...", but no way to log in. If I do "F10 -> View -> Page Style -> No Style" I see vario…

Do you use NoScript? Persona is heavily Javascript-reliant.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#80

Post by [deleted] »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #74

I don't get why persona needs its own branding... Nobody knows what persona is. It should say login with Firefox. Did fb create a new brand for its login system? No it's just login with fb, same with literally every login service except freaking persona. Use your most popular brand instead of forcing all developers to evangelize a new brand. That's just not going to freaking work.

[deleted]
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