Mozilla has announced Persona, a new public-facing name for its BrowserID technology, which aims to make it easier to sign in to websites and Web apps.
Launched in July last year, BrowserID simplifies the login procedure by making it a one-click experience for users. The user’s identity is stored in the browser, meaning that logging in is a simple case of confirming their email address.
As yet, the still nascent BrowserID has seen limited adoption across a number of Mozilla’s own products, although notably not its popular Firefox browser as yet. That may be set to change as it appears Mozilla is now ready to present the technology to the public under the Persona name.
As Mozilla explains in a blog post announcing the new name, “The Persona name resonates with the idea of personhood as well as online identity as a facet of our lives, and therefore strongly tied to user identity. We’re very excited about this new name and the new features our identity system will offer.”
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While the technology behind Persona will still be called BrowserID, the public-facing product is set to offer an identity dashboard, ‘user data interconnect features’ and more. The new name causes some conflict with ‘Personas’, the name for the Firefox feature that allows users to customise the appearance of their browser. However, it was recently announced that this would be renamed, although a new title is yet to be revealed.
There’s no official launch date for Mozilla Persona, but the team behind it says in its blog post that it looks forward to “an action-packed 2012,” so expect further news later in the year.
The news follows yesterday’s announcement that Mozilla will launch its Marketplace for apps built on open Web technologies to developers at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.
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