Reviving BrowserID in 2026(wakamoleguy.com)
25 pointsby wakamoleguy9 hours ago4 comments
  • briansmith7 hours ago
    [I was at Mozilla during the development of BrowserID but I didn’t work directly on it. I was a huge fan of the effort.]

    Besides non-obvious UI issues, there were fundamental issues. One in particular that was very hard to overcome:

    Very few people would choose to hide which websites they are logging into from the identity provider. People don’t care whether their IDP can see when/where they are authenticating. That’s assuming they could even understand the issue at all. They have to trust the IDP a lot either way, and this one detail is small, counterintuitive, and even oxymoronic to most people—Trust the IDP 99%, but jump through hoops to avoid trusting them 100%? Why?

    There is value in the identity provider knowing when, and from which device, and from which location, and on which websites you are using the identity. Hiding any of this from the IDP hurts security. It is really hard to overcome this in a useable way. A lot of purported solutions implicitly assume users have device and key management abilities that even experts in this area rarely consistently practice.

    So, then, are you really better off, i.e. receiving a net positive benefit?

    • stavros3 hours ago
      Sorry, I'm confused. What are the hoops? Wouldn't this be solved by Persona just telling the IdP the URL of the site to auth to?
      • wakamoleguy9 minutes ago
        The biggest one I’ve come across is the ability to manage and revoke sessions from a centralized location. With BrowserID, you can’t just sign out of your IdP and expect all relying parties’ sessions to invalidate. Instead, BrowserID asserts that you controlled the email at a point in time, and then it’s up to the site to decide how to manage the session afterwards.

        3rd party cookie blocking makes this worse, since it’s difficult to silently refresh your session by checking with the IdP behind the scenes. I believe Auth0 uses a hidden iframe for this, which uses 3rd party cookies and looks a lot like a tracking pixel. Without that refresh mechanism, though, relying parties are pushed to have longer lived sessions, which makes the lack of a global revocation worse.

  • aragilar7 hours ago
    I believe https://portier.github.io/ was the replacement for Personas/BrowserID, any reason not to use it?
    • wakamoleguy3 minutes ago
      I’ve tried it in the past. This was a few years ago, so it’s possible it’s changed since then. But the reason I’m not choosing it for myself today is that it relies on either Sign in with Google (fine) or magic links to verify the user. I really don’t want to manage email delivery for this project, which is admittedly a stubborn personal choice. It just adds a lot of complexity that I don’t care to spend time on for hobby projects.
    • egberts16 hours ago
      Nope. Better with your own domain.
  • apimade8 hours ago
    "BrowserID failed in 2016, but WKID won't"

    "And the big providers (gmail.com, outlook.com, yahoo.com, icloud.com) will never be supported."

    You've changed the definition of "success" here. Why not just launch using Persona rather than RYO? What benefits do you provide over it?

  • userbinator4 hours ago
    In this era, the name "BrowserID" just sounds like another dystopian thing.