Mozilla to lower the curtain on Persona in late November
A little over 10 months remains for users of Mozilla's federated identity service, Persona, to move to an alternate platform, after the browser maker detailed plans to end the service.
On the last day of November, Mozilla will take Persona.org and related domains offline, and all user data stored on Persona servers will be destroyed.
Mozilla ruled out transferring the domain or the user data to any third party.
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"We intentionally designed Persona to expose email addresses rather than opaque identifiers, which should ease the transition to other systems that provide verified email addresses," Mozilla's Ryan Kelly wrote in a mailing list message.
Kelly said that until November 30 arrives, Mozilla will still fix any security issues, but no new features will be released or developed.
In a FAQ posted for users of Persona, Mozilla said the service was shut down due to lack of use.
"Our metrics show that usage of persona.org is low, and has not grown over the last two years," the FAQ said. "Hosting a service at the level of security and availability required for an authentication system is no small undertaking, and Mozilla can no longer justify dedicating limited resources to this project. We will do everything we can to shut it down in a graceful and responsible manner."
The Persona code will remain available on GitHub.
In March 2014, Persona was handed over to its community, as Mozilla redeployed its identity developers elsewhere.
Mozilla intended to have Persona available to half the global internet user population by the end of 2013, and despite integration with Google and Yahoo, the service never took off.
Last month, Mozilla said it would halt development and selling of Firefox OS-operated smartphones.