The fact that they keep throwing money at useless stuff like that new design for their logo, while at the same time they refuse to keep useful services online, is a clear sign of the downfall of the Mozilla Foundation.
The project failed to gain widespread adoption. An org that runs marginally valuable side projects indefinitely is an org that is going to face a downfall.
Like you, I'd love to see a better authn mechanism, but Persona wasn't going to be it. So, this frees their resources to focus on what is going to continue making Mozilla relevant. Certainly a declining user base on Persona wasn't going to be it.
My opinion is that Persona was still untested, we will never know whether Persona was going to be it or not because they never launched the browser integration.
They bailed out after failing to displace the most ubiquitous form of authentication in three years. They didn't even have it implemented on their own site for the first six months, and they never built the browser chrome component that would have made Persona appealing to users.
It kinda feels like they gave up before they really got started.
The project failed to gain widespread adoption. An org that runs marginally valuable side projects indefinitely is an org that is going to face a downfall.
Like you, I'd love to see a better authn mechanism, but Persona wasn't going to be it. So, this frees their resources to focus on what is going to continue making Mozilla relevant. Certainly a declining user base on Persona wasn't going to be it.