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Comment by zerostar07 | Hacker News Reader

I for one don't like the new name. BrowserID was a perfect name - just an ID that you can use with browsers. It doesn't require any personal data, so it has nothing to do with social sites or real identity. The interface by default allows you to have multiple browser-ids which by itself contradicts the idea of "personhood". This name may raise concerns about "persona-l" data

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As floatingatoll said [1], BrowserID is the protocol, Persona is Mozilla's implementation of the protocol [2].

[1] http://www.hackerne.ws/item?id=3739315

[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/mozilla.d...

I don't think users care about protocols. When you place a button on a website, the user will see "Login with BrowserID" (right?), which is the consumer-facing part of it. After that they will be able to select a browserid provider among which will be "Mozilla Persona Browser ID" (right?). Why not just list it as "Mozilla BrowserID" or sth. More names, more confusion.

I agree. At first I thought that Mozilla was thinking about solving a internet problem for the internet, and not for it's own, which maybe be naive of me, but was a great idea.

Unverified assumptions below!

TL;DR: You don't select a BrowserID provider. Your email address determines which provider is used. If your email's domain does not publish the "I am a primary" auto-discovery file, then it falls back to us.

BrowserID provider selection is done with service discovery. When you login to a BrowserID site using an email address, there is auto-discovery logic for checking to see if your email address runs a BrowserID primary.

I believe the fallback to BrowserID.org is a bootstrap thing, rather than the desired long-term goal.

Once Firefox integrates BrowserID support, the user will see a native dialog listing available identities to login to the site, with a checkbox to automatically login in the future.

One of the sites that would pop this dialog is Mozilla Persona. Other sites would too. Your identity is an <email@addre.ss>, and then if you want to sign into Persona and build up a profile around that identity, you can.

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