Mozilla Persona
BrowserID
Mozilla tried to let any email address become a private web identity without handing every login to a giant platform, but too few sites adopted it.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Officially Gone
- Peak stage
- general availability
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
A formally operated cross-browser identity and single-sign-on service developed by Mozilla.
Persona used verified email addresses and browser cryptography so websites did not need to receive or store a user's central password.
Existence timeline
Mozilla publishes the identity experiment.
The service enters broader deployment.
Mozilla audits and patches the hosted identity system.
Full-time internal development ends.
Mozilla gives relying sites a migration period.
persona.org authentication stops.
Why it ended
Mozilla shut persona.org down on 30 November 2016 because usage was low and declining.
Last confirmed trace
The protocol, open-source code, Mozilla identity archive and academic security analyses remain available.
What it left behind
Persona anticipated continuing debates over federated login, platform concentration and privacy-preserving web identity.
How we classified it
The archive unit reached normal public release or operation and is no longer obtainable in its original public form.
Verified normal public availability maps to 100 under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.