Howdy,
What is going on with Persona for Desktop Firefox?
Background: Many awesome platform devs (khuey, ddhal, mattn, etc) have
done substantial work towards making Persona native to Desktop. In B2G
land, jedp et al landed a more remote approach, doing amazing work under
tight deadlines.
Landing Persona (sign in to the web, specifically) in Desktop is an
important step towards our Persona adoption story. Desktop has taken the
backseat to B2G, but we now have one committed full time staff to focus
on landing it.
Goal:
Get Fx Desktop Persona in to people's hands as soon as possible, while
still maintaining Desktop performance and security.
Our strategy - MattN and I worked closely on a Hybrid approach for
landing Persona. It's not the original 100% native plan, nor is it
exactly the B2G approach
Hybrid Overview:
* Identity Picker - Native in doorhanger
* Discovery - New WSAPI web service provided by the existing Persona server
* Fallback IdP - Persona server becomes a real IdP
** /.well-known/browserid has provisioning and authentication urls
** These can be used by Fx and other SDK / applications in the future
* Provisioning / Authentication flows for primary or secondary email
addresses are loaded in the same way, a popup controlled via chrome [1]
Various details fall out of this plan either as remote components or
native components on a case by case basis.
Timing:
1) Land Persona server changes (Issue#2497)
2) Get awsbox deployment up while #1 is in progress
3) (Re-)Land Persona on Fx Desktop (hg branch TBD pointing at Persona
dev server or awsbox instance)
4) Get into Fx Desktop UX nightly branch
5) Iterate on Persona server and Desktop code as needed with UX
6) Land polished Persona in Aurora (feature preffed off)
7) Land polished Persona in Nightly (feature preffed on)
8) MFBT
Re-land??? :
We're starting from a previous hg revision that had already landed, and
parts of which were later reverted.
That, plus a few new tweaks.
The goal is to get back to a healthy place with Desktop Fx for bugzilla,
hg, and UX.
This starts with a big gnarly patch (most of which was already r+ in the
past). Watch Bug#845546 over the coming weeks.
After step 4, we'll resume filing specific bugs, have small patches, and
try to leverage the platform team as we can.
Fallback IdP Notes:
We should be able to aggressively land the server side changes, because
only specific builds of Desktop with a feature preference set, will use
it. From a maintenance perspective, the provisioning and authentication
flows will reuse the shim modules and abstractions with minimal code
duplication. Same for HTML and CSS, but this may change of course.
The existing shim continues to exist as is (we don't use the new
provisioning and auth urls) to optimize shim performance.
This summary is to document a conversation Jared and I had. _6a68 please
add anything that I missed.
It is easy to confuse this work with Android, Fx Accounts, Sign in to
the Browser/Device and other native work.
The scope of this work is Sign in to the Web on Desktop.
CCing sync-dev as Jared suggested.
Most Recent Native Team Update:
http://ozten.com/random/identity/Native-Desktop/Desktop-Sept17.webm
I'll send these updates to dev-identity from now on.
thanks!
ozten
[1] This is subject to change after UX feedback cycles of course
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