Identity/Department Status/2013-09-27
Hi Everyone,
Safe travels to your Summit location. We are looking forward to meeting as many Mozillians and Community members as possible.
Identity Status Report for Sep 16 - 27
- Identity Department Focus
The identity team is focused on three key objectives:
- Fixing Sync - We must fix stability and usability issues in the present sync service
- One way to log into firefox - A single email / password and experience for Mobile, Desktop, and Web products (like Marketplace)
- Persona Adoption - We must quantify and increase the number of websites using Persona in Q3
For more information related to all Identity projects: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity
- Signin
Project Overview:
- Persona is designed to eliminate website passwords and empower users to choose their own identity online.
- It's long term goal is to become a standardized and browser-native means of decentralized authentication on the Internet.
Current Status:
- Experimental support for passing an email hint from the originating webpage into the Persona dialog, paving the way for a seamless transition into the Persona dialog from a website login form.
- Improved security of Persona by destroying certificates after each use on untrusted computers.
- Hotfixed an issue regarding Mobile Safari on iOS 7 and Safari on OS X Mavericks.
- Various performance improvements and bug fixes.
- Hosted a Persona event in Mountain View. See below for update.
MV Persona Event took place Wednesday, 25 September Didem Ersoz, Zach Carter and Sean McArthur presented and worked with the attendees. Didem's notes regarding the event follow: We hosted our second Persona meetup in Mountain View on Wednesday, which went very well! We had again 25 participants, but different than the last time in SF, we attracted a group of interested developers!
Sean gave a great overview of Persona and Zach showed a Persona demo for Firefox OS mobile, where Persona for mobile was a question we have been receiving a lot. Peter helped with checking guests in and John M. was there to support us too! So thank you all for your contributions!
- 25 participants vs 92 sign ups, definitely a much better turn out rate than the SF meetup.
- Participants were mainly developers, and a good number of them did not know much about Persona before.
- As the audience were developers, the questions were much around the technology of Persona, which was great.
- A common theme between questions from the two meetups is Persona is working for mobile apps.
- Questions asked by participants:
- What do i do if i change my email address for a site powered by Persona?
- When you enter an email, how do you resolve the email address with the the IdP?
- If the email provider is down, does the website go to Mozilla to check?
- Is it separate from the FIDO, fast identity online alliance?
- Getting the public key information, is it done by the browser or your server?
- How about native apps?
- How does it work: combining sign in and sign up?
- After you provide your email, you get the dialogue to sign in, what controls that dialogue and what that dialogue says. Does the website do that, does Persona do that? Does IdP do that?
- If the IdP provider does a terrible job, then the user will be confused?
- Security? Can you use Persona for a Online Payment site?
- What api are you using re: Zach's firefox os persona demo?
- What is the Persona roadmap like?
- Updates for the Next Meetup:
- Next meetup maybe somewhere in Europe (maybe London, still TBD)
- Considering changing gears to partner with existing relevant meet-up groups to join one their regular meetups to introduce Persona. Having conversations with The Great WebDev Debates meet-up group currently (they have 300+ members) to collaborate for an event in December.
- More to be planned after the summit.
For further information about this event or upcoming Persona events, please don't hesitate to contact Didem Ersoz at didem@mozilla.com.
- PiCL
Project Overview:
- PiCL is a project whose short term goal is to fix Firefox sync.
- The long term goal to give users easy access to their Firefox data from any device.
- PiCL the name is about the long term goal of PiCL - it stands for Profile in the CLoud. Which is to say we're going to take the interesting data in your Firefox Profile and move it to the cloud - make it possible to access and manage this data from web apps, mobile apps, and all of our products - Mobile, Desktop, and OS.
Current Activities: - Weekly Engineering Report: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/sync-dev/2013-September/000479.html
For more information:
- Native B2G & FXOS
Project Overview: B2G: Sign-in on First-run
- We are building Firefox Account creation into the first-time use (FTU) on FirefoxOS. When users unbox their phones, they will provide an email and password. From this, we will create a Firefox Account for them that will give them an identity for use with Marketplace and future cross-device services, like synchronization of bookmark, history, password, and contacts data. Additionally, we will provide an account management app where users can revise their account settings.
- A single place for native implementation overview, status, and teams: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Native_Implementations
Current Activities:
- Partnering with TEF engineers on first-time-use Sign-in with Persona.
- Tauni (Moz) and Noemi (TEF) project managing
- Working with Marketplace and FirefoxOS UX on refining Sign-in and Account Management UX (John Gruen leading)
- Began dev-fxacct mailing list for communication (please join if you're interested!)
- Ongoing work on b2g bugs
Persona Analytics Project Overview:
- Measuring Persona: User adoption, website adoption, error discovery, etc.
Current Activities:
- Decided to de-prioritize A/B testing infrastructure within the dialog itself, as we can test bigger picture issues without it with the help of RPs (and have RPs willing to help out)
- TMTM progress: wireframes for improved UX, PRs for getting new data flows to the dashboard
For more information about our metrics effort, visit our Persona Analytics page and KPI Dashboard [LDAP required].
