Chrome Browser Extension for iCloud Passwords
Apple has released an iCloud password extension for Google’s Chrome browser on Windows that allows iCloud Keychain passwords to be used on PCs.
Called simply “iCloud Passwords,” the extension allows users to access passwords in Google Chrome that have been generated in Apple’s Safari browser. It also enables iCloud syncing of passwords generated in Chrome, making them available on Apple devices, too.
As I wrote just this week in Macworld, Apple has used a number of strategies to encourage users to switch to its products, among them, the “ice water in hell” approach of adapting some of its own software to rival platforms. That’s at least part of the reasoning behind Apple’s iCloud Keychain extension for Chrome, which extends the password manager feature from its own ecosystem to Chrome users on Windows.
But not, interestingly, to Chrome users on the Mac, even though the extension can be installed in that version of Google’s browser. However, according to the text on the extension’s page, it appears to be designed to specifically work with iCloud for Windows, so it doesn’t actually do anything on the Mac beyond providing a broken interface.
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The iCloud bookmark syncing (BookmarkDAV) for Chrome, Firefox and IE (someone wrote major parts of 😉) was/is only available on Windows for those browsers as well.
it appears to be designed to specifically work with iCloud for Windows, so it doesn’t actually do anything on the Mac beyond providing a broken interface.
It appears to hook into a com.apple.passwordmanager, which to my knowledge isn’t a thing on macOS (I couldn’t find such a bundle through Launch Services either). Presumably, this is either a partial port of Keychain (probably not, since much more of Keychain already ran in Safari on Windows, if I’m not mistaken?), or an entirely different API client for iCloud Keychain.
Either way, I hope someone does some deeper spelunking!
It will be a long time before Apple’s poor reputation for cloud services fades from memory. I’ll type out my passwords for now, thanks.
Tell you what though. Get Windows running natively on Apple Silicon and my next laptop will be a MacBook.
If I understand this correctly, there finally will be an easy way to export Safari passwords in bulk so that they can be easily imported into third party, cross platform password managers. Sure, it involves going through Chrome, but that's a lot easier than what has been available in the past.
