Mozilla's BrowserID Becomes Persona, Ready to Take on Google and Facebook

Mozilla's identity project, BrowserID, is moving forward and now it's got a new name, one that will feel familiar to Firefox users nonetheless, Mozilla Persona. Persona will be the name of the user-facing service offered by Mozilla which enables users to manage their online identities, profiles and accounts.

"The Persona name resonates with the idea of personhood as well as online identity as a facet of our lives, and therefore strongly tied to user identity," Mozilla explained.

"We’re very excited about this new name and the new features our identity system will offer. Some of the things we’re planning: an identity dashboard, user data interconnect features, and more," it added.

Mozilla created BrowserID as an alternative to the other identity services, which are deeply dependent on companies, Google, Facebook and so on. The most popular identity services are controlled by big corporations, but Mozilla wants to put the user in charge, hence BrowserID.

Users only need to sign up once, for BrowserID, and can then log into any site that supports the service without registering, like they would with their Google or Facebook accounts.

Now, this user-facing service will be dubbed Mozilla Persona. However, the protocol, technology and other things that are of interest to developers will continue to be named BrowserID.

For now, the technology and service are experimental, there are very few site that support it, mostly demo sites, and there are still a lot of features to implement.

Still, the name change underlines that it's getting ready for a broader use. Mozilla was already using the name, a similar one, for Firefox Personas, the simple themes/skins for the browser, introduced a few years ago. However, Mozilla has announced that it will change the name Personas since it doesn't really represent the product. No new name has been chosen yet.