If you own an iPhone or iPad and you also happen to use Windows, you can now get passwords from your phone or tablet to work on your PC.
Well here’s something we didn’t quite expect: Apple has released a Chrome extension focused on Windows users, and one that makes it possible to bridge some of the password gap when you jump operating systems.
It’s an extension built for Windows PCs specifically, but it’s one that makes it possible to use passwords stored on Apple’s iCloud, except on a Windows PC, something that doesn’t typically happen. Over on a Mac, passwords stored from an iPhone or iPad are held in a Mac’s “Keychain”, and so the Mac gets that access.
But Windows PCs aren’t privy to the keychain because Windows doesn’t support that, so if you have an iPhone and you use Chrome on Windows, your passwords are disconnected. It’s already hard enough to make your passwords the best you can, but having disconnected passwords isn’t easy, especially when you’re trying to do everything you can to have something else remember them for you.
This extension release by Apple fixes part of that, and allows an iCloud account on Windows to tap into the passwords stored on the iCloud account, so they can be used by the Chrome user on Windows simply by adding a Chrome extension. It should also work on Macs with Chrome, because while a Mac user has Keychain access, it might not link up to Chrome with all the passwords. Safari, yes, but Chrome mightn’t see them, and so this should help there.
For folks using Chrome, it may well be a godsend, and even for folks using similar browsers built on the same Chromium system, such as Brave, which allows users to install Chrome extensions.
We don’t believe this brings all of the Apple goodness to Chrome or even Brave, and features like Apple Pay will still likely be missing, but if you’re an iPhone user on a PC and you know this pain well, some of it may well be fixed, at least for now.
Apple’s iCloud Password extension is available now for Chrome on Mac and Windows PC.
