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Comment by camus2 | Hacker News Reader

That's why i cant use Mozilla techs,lot of projects started,few finished.(XULrunner ? Tamarin ? ...). Nobody is going to use Persona now.

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I sincerely hope that's not the case. Mozilla Corporation is still using Persona internally, and still deploying new sites and services that rely on it. We think it's absolutely great for when you need simple, email-based authentication, and we're still fully supporting it.

(PS: Because it's email based, there's absolutely no lock in. Want to migrate away from Persona? Just add a password column to your database. But we hope it won't come to that.)

There's no lock in, but migrating away from Persona isn't quite that simple. You still have to educate users about the switch ("make a new password, and by the way, don't use your Persona password!"), then implement everything Persona provides: login form, password change form, email authentication, ...

If Mozilla did migrate away from persona, would the staff become less familiar with the details over time thus making the best effort support being offered by the community in sumo and being talked about here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/710099

My question for you all is what do you think could be supported once it has been depreciated?

You have to be willing to lose in life. It's unrealistic to expect all hits all the time. If some organization or open source project seems too perfect, look for a "memory hole" where their negative results get flushed.

So XULRunner and Tamarin did not pan out. But we have lots of hits, some still ramping up: Firefox, Firefox OS, Gecko, Servo, Rust, Fennec, various SpiderMonkey iterations including OdinMonkey for Emscripten/asm.js, PDF.js, Shumway.

Negative results are important in science, as roc blogged once (he cited a "Journal of Negative Results", in one of the physical sciences I think). Let's learn from them and make better results, not deny that they happen or keep on banging heads against stout oak trees....

For me, XULRunner is a big success. I use it to run my own xul-based file manager (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/fire-commande...) and I definitely want this tech to stay alive and rocking!

Fair enough, and godspeed. But it's not a product, and it won't be a big consumer platform. We've fed "XUL, the good parts" into the web standards, e.g., flexible box in CSS; and still are, e.g., Web Components.

/be

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