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Why we love Mozilla Persona

blog.zonino.co.uk

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Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#111

Post by drdaeman »

crayola wrote: post #5

Persona is an elegant, powerful idea that is 100% in the users interest. I dearly want to see it gain traction. Kudos for disseminating your enthusiasm.

Not elegant at all, but the best option we have supported by some powerful force (Mozilla) that can push it onto users by embedding it into their browser.

Personally, I view Persona as just an awkward kludge that, while improves some important things, also does certain harm by pushing us one step away from making third parties mere notaries of one's identity, not its very providers.

Because it's me who's the source of my identity, nor my email provider nor domain registrar.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#112

Post by drdaeman »

mixedbit wrote: post #106
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.

"login with your email" is IMO the most adequate wording

This may sound paradoxical, but Persona has nothing to do with actual email. Well, except for Mozilla-provided fallback/compatibility authenticator that, indeed, uses actual email.

It just a protocol that - oversimplifying things - allows a certain server (identified by domain name) to issue you a certificate that says that you have a name associated with that server.

It's usually an email, but can be anything that could be represented as (name, domain) pair by concatenating those with "@" character. For example, XMPP ID, forum nickname or system account.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#113

Post by donrhummy »

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.…

They're working on it: https://github.com/mozilla/persona-yahoo-bridge/issues/178 You should post your findings there

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#114

Post by whitef0x »

kijin wrote: post #73
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, mu…

OpenID never really made it not just because of their bad UX design but also because they never got major players to push it to the public. Google or Facebook would much rather have you use their service as login credentials as it makes more monetary sense to do so than to hand it over to some non-profit foundation like Mozilla or OpenID. Data = money in this world and everyone wants more money.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#115

Post by leo_santagada »

asdasf wrote: post #94
JohnTHaller wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As JavaScript is basically a required feature on the web these days, who cares? All web browsers that anyone tests for come with JS enabled. Anyone who runs NoScript or similar knows that when sites randomly break, they need to either enable JS or accept the fact that they can't visit that site without it. You can run your own Persona provider, meaning you don't have to trust a 3rd party.

>As JavaScript is basically a required feature on the web these days, who cares? People who don't live in a fantasy bubble world where that is true? "Hey, just throw away 1% of your potential user base for no reason" isn't a very compelling sales pitch.

Real teams are doing that all the time, you have to prioritize bugs, they rather fix important stuff and not care for people using IE6-8 and people using linx.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#116

Post by drdaeman »

icebraining wrote: post #95
jol wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Identity Provider goes down, it is a SPOF for the account, but the same is with FB/Twitter login

In Persona, the Identity Provider is not involved in each login, it just signs a temporary certificate which can be re-used by the browser, so as long as the downtime is under a few hours, the user shouldn't have much of a problem.

And if the Identity Provider's gone for a prolonged period now you've lost your identity with (almost) no means of recovery. Mostly, because, while you might believed the contrary, you didn't ever own your "own" identity in this scheme.

That's exactly what SPOF is.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#117

Post by jdlshore »

donrhummy wrote: post #113
rebelde wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

They're working on it: https://github.com/mozilla/persona-yahoo-bridge/issues/178 You should post your findings there

That's for Yahoo, not Gmail.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#118

Post by drdaeman »

StavrosK wrote: post #20
mikevm wrote: post #16

What happens to my account if Persona dies or is temporarily down? Does that mean that I'm locked out?

Nothing depends on Persona. For example, see https://persowna.net/ , which I wrote and which you can use with your own domain for authentication. You can also install your own ID provider on your site and not rely on any third party.

And if "your" domain is suspended, revoked or just expired?

You don't own a domain, you only temporarily lease it from a registrar. Just like with the email account with an email provider.

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#119

Post by stickfigure »

drdaeman wrote: post #112
mixedbit wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"login with your email" is IMO the most adequate wording

This may sound paradoxical, but Persona has nothing to do with actual email. Well, except for Mozilla-provided fallback/compatibility authenticator that, indeed, uses actual email. It just a protocol that - oversimplifying things - allows a certain server (identified by domain name) to issue you a certificate that says that you have a name associated with that server. It's usually an email, but can be anything that c…

That is true, however "login with your email" will be understood by The Average Internet User. Any discourse on login identifiers, domains, xmpp, certificates, et al will just scare them. That's a non-starter.

We use "login with your email".

Re: Why we love Mozilla Persona

#120

Post by justincormack »

pja wrote: post #53
hmans wrote: post #37

Persona is _awesome_. I use it on all my sites. But it also proof that being awesome not only is not good enough to be successful, but simply doesn't matter. The user is not interested in a solution that is awesome, but one that doesn't scare him. And a big ugly third-party popup is as scary as stuff on the web gets these days. Remember Ogg Vorbis?

Vorbis ended up being very successful in some niches - audio for games springs to mind. Persona might find its own niche, even if it never completely displaces Facebook user authentication on the web.

And Spotify uses it too - it just is not very visible https://support.spotify.com/uk/learn-more/faq/#!/article/Wha...
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