I'd like to see finer granularity, perhaps multiple web password vaults and a mechanism to allow certain browsers to use certain vaults.
It might also be nice to specify which passwords could be accessed with which kind of authentication. Unfortunately the current system password dialog is easily spoofable - it really looks like a questionable javascript popup.
The above is not a critique but certainly a list of things that lead to the possibility of a repeat of the infamous Windows popup for every single action you want to do out of the box. This leads to either decision fatigue or a pre-programmed "yes, just do it" response from the vast majority of users.
I personally think it should be an all-or-nothing type of allowance for this reason. Maybe the better way would be tracking access to passwords in Keychain. ie: Chrome+Safari+Firefox have all accessed your credentials for google.com but only Safari has seen your iCloud credentials and only Chrome has seen your HN credentials.
I'm looking forward to iOS doing the same for contacts; there's no reason why WhatsApp/Telegram/etc need access to my entire address book if I just want to call Steve.
Why not? It works fine for Little Snitch.
And here it would be even less prompts, as it would just be every website I visit && have an login account at.
This is pretty much exactly how macOS Safari prompts, and has for several years, at least in Touch ID scenarios. It shows a suggested username/identity with a Touch ID icon next to it, presented just like a normal autofill suggestion otherwise.
The per-site prompt and the inclusion of username/identity are really good signals, and feel like they reinforce the opposite of Windows UAC. They definitely gate access in a similarly repetitive way which encourages repetitive acceptance. But they demonstrate prior authorization that would have to be manual at least once at some point before the prompt, and you won’t be promoted the same way for sites you didn’t manually authorize first.
It’s a good enough signal that I generally use it as my first line of defense against phishing/domain spoofing. If I don’t get promoted for credentials for a service I expect to have an account with, I’m immediately suspicious. That doesn’t mean I automatically trust or distrust on that alone, but it’s a pretty decent sniff test.
It just needs to tell the password "hey there's a password on wellsfargo.com" and then the password manager asks the user if they want to use the password. And maybe give access to all passwords.
IDK, what does safari do?
If you use Chrome Sync with passwords on macOS, Chrome actually stores the decryption key in the macOS keychain. Just open Keychain.app (/System/Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app) and search for "Chrome Safe Storage" to find it. That's the decryption key though with the actual encrypted password/sync data stored elsewhere. (So not possible to access Chrome passwords from the Keychain directly)
Safari Passwords (Apple's password manager) also stores passwords in the Keychain as individual entries and you can access them via Keychain.app
Apple has no such problem since they don’t have other OEMs.
Same deal with why Google got in trouble with the play store.
Other browsers used to be able to use it. I do think it’s a really thorny issue—“allow this application to access all saved passwords?” is a pretty damn scary permission to include. Up there with the “allow this application to control your computer” permission that is used for accessibility apps (which apps can abuse to read passwords, if I understand correctly).
Apple’s tradition. Make the platform more secure, add an exception for first-party apps, and let the other browsers fuck off.