In its 5-year lifespan Persona never caught on with users

Jan 12, 2016 11:56 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla's Ryan Kelly has announced that the Foundation will completely disavow its former brainchild and shut down the Persona single-sign-on system on November 30, 2016.

Launched in 2011, the Mozilla Persona service was supposed to be an alternative to OpenID and Facebook Connect, a single-sign-on service that would allow website operators to support login and registration capabilities on their sites, but without hosting any passwords on their service.

Users would register and log in with only an email and one single password for multiple services. The concept was simple, but just like other single-sign-on services, adoption was scarce.

Three years later, in 2014, citing the reason of limited adoption, Mozilla decided to transfer the project to the community's care, only committing to supplying basic resources for the service to continue operating and a security update here and there.

With adoption rates still going down, Mozilla has now changed course and has decided to pull the plug entirely.

Users have never taken to using the Persona login system

After November 30, 2016, Mozilla will take the persona.org domain offline, will delete all the user data on its servers, and will publish the latest updates to Persona's GitHub repository.

The community is free to deploy the project's source code on their own, but they'll be doing it without Mozilla's financial resources or the persona.org domain, which the Foundation decided to retain.

Since Mozilla Persona did not use usernames but employed emails, Mozilla's staff says that websites currently implementing its Persona login system should find it very easy to migrate their users to other types of authentication. Webmasters can find details on alternative login system on a dedicated wiki page.

In the past month, this is the third project Mozilla ditches, after previously announcing it was looking for a new maintainer for the Thunderbird email client and then decided to pull Firefox OS out of the smartphone market.