Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

stavros.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 243 posts

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#91

Post by smacktoward »

soapdog wrote: post #63

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 gma…

> 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.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#92

Post by gbuk2013 »

scrollaway wrote: post #6

> I don’t know if something like a Kickstarter campaign to raise some money to pay for engineer time would help sway Mozilla at all, but I’m perfectly happy pledging a few hundred dollars and running the campaign, if necessary. I just really want to see Persona succeed. I mentioned this by email, but I'll repeat it here: I believe in the design behind Persona. I believe a well structured, free authentication provider…

I was also sorry to see Mozilla give up on Persona - I believe the web needs something like this.

I happen to be quite good with Node / JavaScript and I will happily help out.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#93

Post by quadrangle »

wpietri wrote: post #73
SwellJoe wrote: post #5

I hate that the best user experience for logins is "Login with facebook" or "Login with Google". I don't want to impose that privacy failure on my users, but I also don't want to impose the annoyance that is "Sign up with a username, email address, and password". Offering all of the options is also a compromise that complicates the user experience. Now, here's the sad thing, for me: I didn't even know Persona existed…

Having used Persona on my last project, I'd agree. The article brushes aside the "no traction" bit and says, basically, "the idea was awesome". But that's why we test ideas and measure them by results like traction: not all great ideas turn into great products. Persona as deployed was an appealing idea that did not provide a great user experience (or really, a great developer experience). To fill the gap, you need to…

The entire point of "Persona" is that it was actually something in the backend called "BrowserID" that was supposed to integrate with the browser instead of running some random JS widget in a page. Well, Mozilla never even finished implementing the first version of that before they declared "no traction"! What nonsense!

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#94

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

It's alarming that after 2 years they killed it off for lack of traction, and not only that, decided they had failed.

How could they have possibly succeeded in that timescale? They seem to think there were flaws with Persona, and that's true, but those flaws could be fixed. Making a few mistakes on an attempt doesn't mean you should kill it off if the basic product works well. It means you fix them. Starting a new Persona is silly, Persona itself works.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#95

Post by mook »

Osmose wrote: post #82

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, I maintain django-browserid (and StravosK is a valued contributor many sites. This is all just my own personal opinion. I was very bullish on Persona early on, but the fact of the matter is, we failed . And not just because (as I feel is being implied) some higher up suddenly came over and asked for an unreasonable amount of adoption for a revolutionary product. We failed for a thousan…

To me, Persona never _shipped_. They still discourage self-hosting the identity verification code, so even on a happy path where the user somehow managed to get an email provider that natively supported Persona you still had to talk to Mozilla servers. That's not federated identity, it's centralized; it offers nothing above Facebook Connect.

Would doing that alone have made Persona a success? Probably not. But as it is, it's not even in the running.

(Context: I wrote my own IdP, so in theory I could have been on that happy path.)

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#96

Post by quadrangle »

Osmose wrote: post #82

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, I maintain django-browserid (and StravosK is a valued contributor many sites. This is all just my own personal opinion. I was very bullish on Persona early on, but the fact of the matter is, we failed . And not just because (as I feel is being implied) some higher up suddenly came over and asked for an unreasonable amount of adoption for a revolutionary product. We failed for a thousan…

Well, yeah, but Persona/BrowserID didn't fail, YOU (Mozilla) failed. BrowerID was the right concept, and it was insanely stupid to create a different frontend branding, to not build the browser integration, to not explain anything well, and then to describe the project as a failure when it hadn't even been implemented at all on your side.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#97

Post by maaku »

toyg wrote: post #83
manigandham wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a problem, it just means you can login with multiple emails then. They're still unique to you. LinkedIn and Facebook and other services already do this. A username/real name can still be used as the "name" if this is an online community or something similar.

> They're still unique to you. Nope. Most free email providers out there (including gmail) have policies for username expiration, some even quite aggressively (like one month without login). "Me" on one of these services might not be "me" in three months' time, but you-website won't know that and will happily send a password reset link to my old email.

Also, people share email addresses.

Really, they do.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#98

Post by quadrangle »

hexis wrote: post #70

I haven't looked into Persona since they shut it down, but is it a protocol or a service? If it was actively developed again, would one be able to use Persona without integrating with any Mozilla service at all or would there always be a Mozilla layer involved?

The backend was called BrowserID, and it was supposed to integrate with your browser and be supported by email providers not be some Mozilla service. It's only a service because they didn't get around to implementing the actual BrowserID design, so they run a service for now, and then they halted development before they even tried to build the actual design!

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#100

Post by quadrangle »

SimeVidas wrote: post #88
sova wrote: post #14

Persona is a most promising idea because it will eventually lead to secure passwordless login everywhere. Keep the pedal to the metal guys!

But Persona isn’t passwordless, or?

Persona is passwordless. The idea is that you verify with your email provider who supports it. Your email provider may have a password, but there's no Persona-related password (unless you use Mozilla's Persona.org service because your email provider doesn't support Persona directly).
Post reply on HN