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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

- Reconsider investing more efforts and funds into Persona.

"Leaving it up to the community" - we all know what that means. Even if it doesn't mean it though, what image does that leave? Sure, they use it as their internal auth system, but nobody outside mozilla cares about their internal auth.

Mozilla is in favour of the open web. An open web needs properly open third party authentication. They obviously know that since Persona does things right. It seems like, since it didn't gain the traction they wanted it (in my opinion due to bad marketing and bad prioritizing than anything else), they're just giving up.

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If Persona was really of use to the Internet community at large, I think we would've seen it be rapidly adopted, regardless of how much "marketing" Mozilla engaged in.

While it might be nice to have from an ideological standpoint, in practice it just isn't of much value to enough people. This may not be pleasant to admit, but I do think that it's the reality.

Compare it to Firefox. Firefox proved to be a product that was useful to a lot of people, and it rapidly gained a comparatively large share of the market quite quickly.

Persona has been the opposite of that. Its adoption never took off, and there's nothing to suggest that it ever will. It just wouldn't make sense for Mozilla to waste more resources on a dead-end effort, especially when those resources could be put toward improving a product like Firefox, which is actually used by millions of people today.

> Compare it to Firefox. Firefox proved to be a product that was useful to a lot of people, and it rapidly gained a comparatively large share of the market quite quickly.

Woah. Put those pink glasses away. Firefox took YEARS to become anything else than a toy browser in the eyes of even developers.

Firefox was released in 2002 (and let's not even count before it was actually "Firefox" and not the Mozilla browser). In 2005, IE still had almost 90% market share. In 2007, it still had almost 70% market share.

Chrome was the game changer, not Firefox. Firefox managed to stay around and slowly grind its way to 20ish % not because it was an exceptional browser, but because the alternatives were awful.

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