What you need to know
- Google Chrome version 106 for Mac and Windows is set to offer biometric authentication for passwords.
- The upcoming feature has been discovered in the new Chromium Gerrit commit.
- It looks like this functionality won’t be available for Chromebooks yet.
Google Chrome is arguably the most popular browser in the world, as it is available on practically every platform. And when you use Chrome on a daily basis, you will find yourself needing to enter passwords and fill in logins all the time.
Google is improving Chrome’s built-in password manager, recently bringing a home screen shortcut for Android users. When it comes to the security of these passwords, you can just “unlock” the password vault using your phone’s built-in fingerprint scanner.
And it looks like the next version of Chrome will provide the same functionality for both Mac and Windows users. According to new science in chrome geritespotted before Chrome storyChrome version 106 will bring biometric authentication when accessing Google passwords.
Once Chrome v106 arrives, the feature will be turned off by default, but you will be able to manually enable the Chrome flag to test it. From there, expect some sort of dialog to pop up so that you can be sure that the fingerprint scanner is working properly in conjunction with this new feature.
When digging into the code itself, it appears that this upcoming functionality is limited to Mac and Windows PCs. What is somewhat surprising is the fact that this feature is not yet available on Chrome OS devices.
Given that many of the best Chromebooks have a fingerprint scanner, it seems like something Google could be hiding. This is probably only the first step in the process, as Google may want to work around any potential kinks and see if it’s something that users will be empowered and enjoy.