I have to say that I'm really loving Mozilla/Mozilla Research these days. Their heart is in the right place, and their research projects like Asm.js, Persona, Rust, and Firefox OS are very cool. They are what Google was in 2005.
Unlike Google in 2005, Mozilla is a non-profit actively working to protect user privacy & build a better web. Also, everything we build is open source :-)
Rust is perhaps the only thing that you listed with any real promise. It is bringing in some good ideas from other programming languages, and it does appear to be a language that may eventually offer some practical value.
Asm.js is, at best, a very ugly hack. Instead of going in the right direction and eliminating JavaScript in favor of a proper embedded runtime or virtual machine, it's just promoting further use of bad (even if widespread) technologies.
Firefox OS doesn't appear to be anything but a me-too catch-up effort. Nothing suggests it can truly compete with iOS or Android, never mind the numerous other mobile OSes out there that are available on far more devices and actually have at least some users.
Persona is perhaps a good-hearted effort, but it's pretty clear that it isn't catching on. There are already too many other authentication systems out there, and many of them have far more traction.
The community as a whole would likely get much better value if Mozilla focused on the software that many people actually use on a daily basis, like Firefox and Thunderbird, rather than these side projects that don't really offer much at all.
That's unfortunate to hear. I would have hoped that you'd be more aware of its actual level of adoption.
Taking an objective look at the situation, as somebody who isn't tied to the project, I just don't see it being used. While so many web sites and applications allow authentication using Google, Facebook, Twitter and even some other more obscure providers, I never see Persona listed as an option.
The adopters listed in the article are minor, at best. Given that the BrowserID initiative has been public for almost two years now, it's not a very impressive list.
It's easy to write blog articles claiming that "hundreds of millions of Web users are now ready to log in with just a few clicks", but we just don't seem to be seeing that actually happening in practice.
I contest that GNU Mailman, the Eclipse Foundation, Firebase, the Born This Way Foundation, and Discourse are hardly "minor, at best." Not to mention extensive dogfooding within Mozilla itself.
Less flippantly, these things take time. While the initiative has been public for some time, it's only been in beta for roughly 6 months. It would be irresponsible for many organizations to jump on board this early, and taking that as a sign of failure is disingenuous.
