seanmonstar

Oh yeah! So excited about all this hard work the team has put in. And it feels so good to know I helped on these features:

Use your Existing Accounts. We’ve bridged yahoo.com, but of course we built an open system: any domain can now become a Persona Identity Provider so users can reuse their existing accounts on any site that uses Persona.

Built Into Firefox OS. We built in support for Firefox OS and made Persona much faster on all mobile devices. This gives Firefox OS apps an even better experience when using Persona.

Clearly, we hope Firefox OS in itself helps a lot of people. But here’s the real mission:

In this sense, Firefox OS is as much a project to improve the Web as it is a project to build a new mobile operating system. Every Firefox OS API Mozilla can get adopted by other major browsers makes it easier for developers to convert vanilla Web apps into “native” Firefox OS apps, and vice versa. Even if Mozilla’s OS never gains significant market share, the effort to flesh out a complete set of Web standards for mobile computing will help to push the Web forward.

And:

Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to ensure that mobile websites will continue to be relevant even as developers create hundreds of thousands of proprietary apps. Firefox could lose the battle for the smartphone OS market but still win the war for open standards.

This is Epic!¹ JavaScript has really been gaining ground recently. Soon we will play triple-AAA quality games by going to a website.

David Storey:

Only one browser engine remains where the dominant contributions come from an independent vendor who don’t have a vested interest in a large native ecosystem.

It’s a much more thorough breakdown of why Opera’s switch to WebKit isn’t a good thing.

This is not something to celebrate.

Sure, everyone thinks that since WebKit is currently rocking it, that everyone should just switch to it, and stop “wasting” time competing. The truth is, that’s what happened to IE6. It was the new hotness when it came out, but without competition, it sizzled.

A more recent example: CSS gradients. If there were no competing browsers, the de-facto standard of gradients would be what the WebKit came up with, instead of the saner version in the specification.

I wrote a guest post for @davidwalshblog about how to get started using Persona.

The Identity Team has released Beta 1 of Persona:

For the past year Mozilla has been working on an experimental login system that completely eliminates passwords on websites while being safe, secure, and easy to use. Today we’re casting off the “experimental” label and announcing the first “beta” release of Persona.

This super exciting¹, and only the beginning. This step is letting website owners know that they can start using it reliably on their websites. We won’t change the API.

Next steps include:

• Empowering Identity Providers (IdP) to authenticate their own users, like Gmail, Yahoo, or your own private email, instead of depending on the Persona verification.
• Getting browsers to implement the dialog and API natively.

Yes, we hope to eventually remove ourselves from it all.

Rob Hawkes about the upcoming Firefox OS:

Let me be perfectly clear; Firefox OS is the start of something huge. It’s a revolution in waiting. A breath of fresh air. A culmination of bleeding-edge technology. It’s magical and it’s going to change everything.

He goes on to discuss 2 big reasons why Firefox OS must happen:

The second reason for ‘Why Firefox OS?’ is that it’s an attempt to not only provide an open alternative mobile platform, but to stand up to and try and influence the big proprietary mobile players to change things.

Persona gains more traction, and libraries are coming out for various platforms. The short list:

• Node.js - https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport-browserid
• Rails - https://github.com/intridea/omniauth-browserid
• Django - https://github.com/mozilla/django-browserid