The web never got an open identity layer. Agents are forcing the question open again — and this time, the open answer has to be the one that works.
I led the BrowserID/Persona effort at Mozilla from its first days — first building, then as product lead — until shortly after Persona launched. Plenty of people contributed as much as I did, and more on the technical side; but I was in the room for just about every protocol and product decision, so I know what we got right and where it failed. What we got right, I'd still defend today: email as identity, and shipping the scaffolding ourselves — it worked with any email, in any browser, from day one, and the only people we had to convince were websites. Why it died is a longer story: timing and priorities inside Mozilla at least as much as anything in the market, a too-late bridge to the big mail providers, and, yes, passwords that were just barely tolerable — so an open protocol stayed optional. The project failed; the idea never did.
A decade of other work later, agents changed the terms. You cannot hand an agent your password and call it fine; credentials that merely annoyed humans become indefensible at machine speed. The identity question is open again, and the answer will harden into infrastructure that lasts decades. browserid-ng is my second run at it: Persona's best idea, kept — and extended to the thing 2011 never anticipated, agents acting on your behalf. It's an independent project, not affiliated with Mozilla.
Everything here is built against a short set of written principles. Their spirit, in one breath: your identity is an email-shaped name that answers to you and no one else; anyone can join the system — as an issuer, a site, or a broker — without asking permission; an agent is a real actor whose authority is always borrowed — scoped, attributed, revocable; all of it has to be easy, because ease is what makes the right way the common way; everything that stands between you and the world, browser and wallet and broker and the AI agent itself, owes its loyalty to you; and none of it may ask anyone to choose between open and working.
The whole stack is open source (MPL-2.0), free to use, and developed in public by me, Dan Mills (@vthunder) — protocol, broker, SDKs, this site. But the fastest way to understand it is to try it: in a couple of minutes your agent can have an identity of its own, sign a public wall with it, and lose the permission the moment you revoke it. Start with the demos, or say hello via the contact page.