Mozilla's Web site login alternative known as Persona hits a new beta and unveils a new feature today. You now can sign in to any Web site supporting Persona using a Yahoo Mail account.

Persona is an open authentication system that works on desktops and mobile devices and is still in development. In addition to being able to log in using either your Persona ID or your Yahoo credentials, today's release introduces support for Firefox OS, which means that you can expect to use Persona to log in to any Firefox OS devices that launch later this year. It also includes back-end changes that Mozilla says make the login system work twice as fast as before. Mozilla boldly claims that Persona will also be a "password killer."

It's a bit hard to verify from the Persona promotional video, embedded above, how it will achieve that, but the utility of not having to remember multiple usernames and password can't be understated -- as long as your password isn't "abc123" or worse, "password."

Persona is different from most login systems like the ones for Google or Facebook. Those limit you to using your login for their sites, while the new Persona Beta 2 supports Yahoo accounts; Mozilla says it plans to add other accounts later this year.

For a successful implementation of Persona, it requires that both your Web mail provider and the Web site you're visiting support it. According to some studies,... [Read more]