Signing in with Persona. Image: Mozilla.

The Persona project is Mozilla’s effort to tackle online identity management by eliminating usernames and passwords. Instead, Persona shifts the focus away from individual websites and handles the login details for you, using just your email address.

Among the new features in this release are some speed improvements, integration with Firefox OS and, most importantly, support for signing in with your existing Yahoo webmail account.

It’s the latter feature that just might give Persona the traction it needs to convince more big name sites to support it.

Using the new Yahoo email-based sign-in feature you can sign in to any website that supports Persona without creating a username or password — you just drop in your Yahoo email address and you’re done.

Mozilla calls this Identity Bridging and it’s available now for Yahoo.com email users with other popular webmail providers coming in the future. You can try it out on Mozilla’s demo site — click “Sign in”, enter your Yahoo email address and you’re done. To see what it looks like in action, check out the video below:

For more on Persona and the new features, head on over to the Mozilla blog. If you’d like to see what it takes to support Persona on your site (thankfully it’s much easier than OpenID), the Mozilla Developer Network has a good tutorial.

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.