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AFAIK Right now there are two things that Mozilla controls.

1) login.persona.org that takes care of authentication

2) a JavaScript shim that developers add to their sites to get the login button to work.

Persona is designed in such a way that reliance on Mozilla will be phased out as email providers take care of #1 and as browsers start to implement #2. As of now I think FireFox is the only browser that has #2 baked in.

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Actually, only FirefoxOS has #2 baked in. Everything else is using the shim.

I'm pushing us to get our data formats stabilized in the next few months so that we can start building native extensions for browsers and get ourselves completely out of that loop.

It's worth thinking of Persona as the reference implementation of the BrowserID protocol. If we're successful, Persona as you know it automatically disappears as more and more domains and browsers add native support for the protocol. :)

Not clear to me why we would trust "email providers" to do a great (i.e. well-implemented, secure, etc.) job at providing authentication services.

Then pick someone who does convince you, or run your own authentication. The point is that it is designed to be decentralised.

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