mmayo

I'm not really speaking for "Mozilla" because what does that even mean? But as one of the folks doing this summer program for Mozilla, I can say 100% we'd be excited to see a good application around this. There's a bunch of great browsers out there, most based on Chromium, but we're all pretty tied up with search as the only way to fund. Brave's made a step away from that, which is cool. I'd love to see more attempts at browsers with different funding models. If you have an idea and at least, say, the beginnings of a small team who could execute, we're available to provide feedback before you submit an application. thx!

Wow, big scope, but cool project. Any sense on what app will have the strongest pull with early users? Seems like a "I came for email but stayed for the notes" situation, but that's only me guessing.

looking forward to seeing your application!

Hi folks, I'm the turbo nerd mentor. :) Systems biology and comp sci was a weird combo in 1992, but it led me to working on cool systems like NFS, FreeBSD, the Human Genome Project, IMAP, Solaris Containers, and eventually browsers (Firefox). It's been fun and super satisfying to occasionally see technology I had a hand in make new things possible for developers. At Joyent I helped create an environment for Ryan and Isaac to build up the nascant node.js community and that experience stuck with me as something to be repeated. New things require space and time and support, and that's why I'm here doing this new Mozilla incubator. Maybe we already have the next node.js - hi deno! - but what about zero knowledge proofs deployed against the 1000 different places in the Internet where the landlords tax us today? Can't wait to see what you all want to build. I'm around all day, ama!

Disclosure: the Identity team at Mozilla work for me.

tldr; we couldn't get it to work.

Let's get something straight first. I'm not a fan of excuses. Persona failed to achieve its goals, and I'd rather we own up to what it was good at, and what it failed at, learn from it, and keep fighting for better authentication on the internet because that's what matters. We play to win at Mozilla based on the principle that to have influence in a market, you need adoption. We're willing to play the long game when we have some line-of-sight to success, in other words, but it was clear that even if we had a team of 100 on Persona we were not going to see adoption.

Persona was never close to being shippable on desktop. It's true that we spent effort trying to make Persona work for Firefox OS, and that effort did not result in a fantastic on-device experience. Sign-in to web? Yes. Sign-in to device? Not so much. Federated login is really hard, unsurprisingly, for UX reasons as much or more than raw technology reasons. This is difficult stuff, and changing user expectations about how an "account" works is very, very difficult.

As the AAR linked to in this post iterates, there were a lot of factors involved in why Persona never took off, but most important was the 3-way cold-start due to needing large numbers of users, supporting IdPs (email providers), and many RPs (websites) before the system as a whole could get to critical mass. There was simply no evidence at all that adding a native implementation would have pushed any of the large IdPs (i.e. email providers) to support the system. In fact, the opposite is true; when we decided to start offering more Firefox services ourselves we effectively had the kinds of authentication/authorization challenges any large IdP would have and we found Persona unfit for our needs. (entropy generation as one example, covered in the FAQ)

We could have kept adding complexity to Persona to support Firefox/Mozilla specific use cases, but I believe we made the right call and let Persona focus on its core value prop - sign-in to the web with a verified email. We spent time and money to stabilize and fix inconsistencies in the API, and signed up to continue running the core secondary service for the Internet. We've invested heavily, and continue to invest in pushing identity on the web forward.

One last comment: It's important to note here that we did choose the underlying BrowserID protocol for use with Firefox accounts, incurring significant engineering cost (supporting your own authentication stack is not free), so that if we're successful in becoming a large IdP, we get a chance to fight this federation fight again without being in an adoption stalemate next time. Will that future system be exactly Persona? Almost certainly not -- we have to be willing to iterate the design and protocols until we've got something that works -- but we do believe that BrowserID/VEP is the right technology to be building from, and that we should let Persona continue to fulfill its current sweet spot for sign-in to the web for sites that love the way Persona works.

We'll be opening up the beta to a wider audience post-KO.