Saturday 29 August 2009

ESUG and Keychain integration for Firefox

I arrived this afternoon in Brest, France for the ESUG 2009 conference. I didn't write much Smalltalk but got caught up with a few people and had a couple of interesting discussions.

There will be much Seaside to come but, taking a break from that over the past few days, I also managed to get a beta version released of my Keychain Services Integration extension for Firefox that allows OS X users to store their logins and passwords in Apple's keychain. This allows the passwords to be shared with other browsers like Safari and Camino and also lets you take advantage of features like Keychain locking to protect your stored passwords. If you use Firefox 3.x on OS X, give it a try and let me know how it goes - it's scratching an itch for me anyway.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just installed the extension and it seems to have imported everything OK. However, documentation seems very sparse. For example, does it automatically add new entries to the Keychain? Does it prompt me first? Can I decide whether to leave out an entry either at the time it's made or later? What happens if I delete an entry from the Keychain -- does it get resynced later?

I understand it's a beta, and it's certainly useful so far -- I'm frankly surprised Firefox doesn't have this functionality built in. But documentation would be welcome; I'd be happy to help write some.

Julian Fitzell said...

Well, it *should* behave exactly like the normal password storage. The only difference is that, instead of storing the password in your profile, it gets stored in the Keychain.

It doesn't currently handle Safari's method of indicating "do not store passwords for this domain", choosing instead to continue storing that information in the Firefox profile.

If you think there's documentation needed, though, I'm happy to include something you contribute.

Anonymous said...

It would be great if keychain also works with new firefox 4.0b4 and above.

Julian Fitzell said...

It's been updated but is waiting for approval on Mozilla Addons. You can get it from the issue tracker in the meantime if you like.

Topher said...

Hello!
We are having a problem where we have a cert that the valid time frame goes til 2109. The Cert imports fine but shows the date to be 05/15/09 making the cert invalid to Firefox. How does your plugin grab the date? Will you be fixing this in the future?

Thanks,
Topher

Unknown said...

Looking forward for Keychain addon to work in FF4.0

Julian Fitzell said...

Version 1.1 should work with FF4.0 (at least on OS X 10.6 - I still need confirmation that it works on 10.5). It's posted on Mozilla Add-ons now but is still pending approval, so you'll have to go directly to that link in order to install it.

Iraê said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Iraê said...

Hi there! I just wanted you to know how much I like your extension. I used that to import my passwords into the keychain and keeping using firefox this way.

Nowadays Apple uses the 'iCloud' keychain instead of the 'login' keychain to sync passwords to the iPhone Safari. It would be a great idea to integrate the extension to this keychain as as option. This way I could have my Firefox passwords available on my iPhone.

Since the project is not open source, I thought maybe you could add the feature, or if your willing tho share, I would gladly make a pull request if you open source it on github :)

Cheers!

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