Mozilla is moving Persona, its online identity system, out of the experimental category and is releasing an official beta.

First released earlier this year, Persona offers a secure way to eliminate individual passwords for users while offering developers a simple way to add support and authenticate requests — think of it as OpenID without the headaches.

After seven months of morphing APIs and various Persona improvements, Mozilla has deemed the project “ready to use for authentication.” Persona works in all major desktop and mobile browsers and, according to Mozilla, the user experience has been considerably polished for this release. While Mozilla claims it’s ready to use, bear in mind that Persona is still officially a beta.

Mozilla Persona is a distributed online identity system. It’s part of Mozilla’s effort to tackle online identity management by shifting the focus from individual websites to a decentralized system that sites tab into.

Mozilla has been playing with the idea of a browser-based identity manager for quite some time, starting with its BrowserID project. BrowserID is the foundation of Persona, but the new system offers quite a bit more for both developers and users, including user-friendly features like an “identity dashboard” for managing your various credentials.

For more info on how Persona works, check out the screencast on Mozilla’s identity blog. If you’d like to try adding Persona support to your site, head over the Mozilla developer site to read through the Persona documentation.