Guess What Apple Paid to "Buy" the Firefox Extension for iCloud Keychain

Good news! As of today, there’s an official Firefox extension for Passwords.app / iCloud Keychain.

“What? There wasn’t one already?" you might say.

Fair question! Maybe it was a bit much to ask of the famously cash-strapped company to take care of those of their users who want to use the only* independent* browser. (To me, this reveals one of the reasons why I think you should rather store your passwords with a third party you trust.)

Luckily, the lonely lad (or lady) Aurélien has been maintaining an unofficial add-on for years! 🫡

“But now Apple has managed to scrape together the cash to build one themselves??"

Not quite… Apple reached out to Aurélien, through Mozilla, to ask if Apple could simply get the code of the unofficial plugin. (Source)

“Ah, so instead of starting from scratch, they instead bought a good starting-point. Smart."

Well, not quite… From the GitHub thread linked above:

The user Hakusaro: “Thank you for all your hard work. And I really hope Apple at least paid you a little for this."

Aurélien: “Unfortunately not. I suggested a $1 one-time GitHub sponsorship as acknowledgement before the transfer, but didn’t get an answer."

This comment was last week, and there hasn’t been an update on this since – but I really, really hope it’s just due to slow processes within Apple. Because fuck them if they can’t contribute a single dollar to someone who has helped Apple’s users for years, and Apple directly now.

I know that large corporations are notoriously bad at sponsoring the open-source projects that they depend on – but this is just so blatant.¹

OBS: If anything has changed since I wrote this, or if I’ve misunderstood something, please let me know! I’ll gladly update the post.