End of Support for Firefox Lockwise
support.mozilla.org
support.mozilla.org
When the app is discontinued, will I still be able to use autofill in other apps?
And what about the apps where autofill doesn't work? Having to open my browser for every password I need to copy on my phone just seems clunky and stupid.
I'm so fucking sick of Mozilla breaking their UX flows for every damn thing. Just keep the app!
Yes on Android, I have no knowledge of iOS. Just go into the Settings -> Logins and Passwords -> Autofill in other apps.
Thankfully it appears it will work
You don't (at least for Android), the functionality of Lockwise appears to have been replicated in Firefox. There's a toggle in the logins and passwords settings section of Firefox to allow it to fill in passwords for other apps.
Apparently they're rolling it out in iOS next month, according to the article (as jdlshore pointed out).
> "Make sure you trust this app"
> "Firefox Beta uses what's on your screen to determine what can be autofilled."
So, unless I'm mistaken, it sounds like the OS gives the selected app special privileges to read what's on the screen (at all times?). I would much rather have a standalone, single-purpose app doing this than a gigantic browser. The former is much easier to secure.
> Firefox for iOS will already sync your saved Lockwise passwords. You can currently only use those inside Firefox. Check back for updates in December 2021 on how to use Firefox for iOS as your system-wide password manager. [It's already there on Firefox for Android.]
Well, still looking. They are outta here.
I like KeepassXC one Android and MacOS; Keepassium free-tier on iOS works great. On Android you can use syncthing, but syncthing doesn't work on iOS, so I use NextCloud to sync everything now.
For Windows 10/11 users who use a MS account, put a portable copy of Keepass on OneDrive and it'll be there right after a fresh reinstall plus sign-in, and you can access it from the Android app using OneDrive sync built into K2A.
The whole meme that saving the 2fa seed to password managers is a bad idea needs to die. Most of the advantages of 2fa are still present when using a password manager.
If your device is compromised, your device is compromised.
It doesn't matter what the advantages of 2FA are. You don't have 2FA ("two-factor authentication") if your factors are stored together.
Are they the worst? No. Are there better ones? Yes.
*The number of people at work which put their username in the URL field is astounding. We also have people saving personal passwords into shared folders without realizing it. This speaks to UI issues.
> On December 13th 2021, the Firefox browser will be officially "resorbing" Firefox Lockwise. Don't worry, all your saved Lockwise passwords will still be available through the Firefox browser using a Firefox account.
> The Firefox Lockwise app will no longer be updated and supported by Mozilla and will not be available in the Apple App and Google Play Stores. After that date, current Lockwise users can continue to access their saved passwords and their password management in the Firefox desktop and mobile browsers.
It seems pretty clear-cut to me.
Sibling says it's working in Nightly -- I'm using the regular stable release on Android and it's there. Haven't even updated it for a few weeks at least. (I just didn't know it existed before now, I was using Lockwise.)
All in all it makes sense tbh - Lockwise used FF account and sync... Who would have one with synchronised data and not be using FF on their phone (esp. Android) anyway?
If so, that's a thankful addendum to this announcement.
Edit: yep, in settings, logins and passwords, there are two toggles, one to allow Firefox to fill in passwords for web pages, and one to allow Firefox to fill in passwords for other sites, which takes you to the Android password manager selection section.
Basically: when you focus an input textbox Android asks the service for autocompletion, and then you can choose one of the options which is entered as if the user has typed it. The service already has the password, and the destination app can only get it when you select it (same as if you write it yourself).
In the opposite scenario when you enter data in some inputs Android asks the service if it is interested in them (but without sending the content). If it does, it asks the user, and only when the user accepts the password/content is sent to the service.
In any case, you need to explicitly choose if you want to use or change a service for this purpose, and only one can be enabled at any time.
Hopefully we see more culling of similar products and so that the engineering budget can steer back towards building a better browser and hopefully working back towards having a decent slice of the market.
I would bet that a lot quackery will be sponsored before the core product gets its longtime bugs fixed.
They could have worded it as All Lockwise functions being integrated into Firefox, iOS version coming in December.
Nope, this is it. Or may be it is me being dumb. But judging from some comments here this support document is extremely unclear.
Which is very typical of modern day Mozilla.
It is just human nature.
Little sad writing this since I followed Firefox before it was called Firefox.
Can’t say I didn’t see it coming. Lockwise was full of bugs and hadn’t been updated for quite some time.
> Check back for updates in December 2021 on how to use Firefox for iOS as your system-wide password manager.
Seems Lockwise is being EOL'd in exchange for Firefox itself as the password management app.
This is a bummer but not surprising. There have been a number of outstanding bugs that were never addressed and releases were slowing down - even when github commits were getting backed up.
Their repo also hasn't seen any commits for about a year now:
I had to switch back to Safari from Firefox on iOS because the latter had so many issues and missing features by comparison. Lockwise was the only solution from a developer I trust for syncing passwords between Ubuntu and iOS, and iCloud passwords are unavailable on Linux.
I really hope iOS Firefox is updated to support system-level password management!
> Note: Firefox for iOS will already sync your saved Lockwise passwords. You can currently only use those inside Firefox. Check back for updates in December 2021 on how to use Firefox for iOS as your system-wide password manager.
Thanks for looking out for us, Mozilla! :)
They've managed to lose almost all their market popularity, mobile Firefox share is almost nonexistent, they pay their executives extremely disproportionately compared to most nonprofits, they have expanded into countless failed side projects (Firefox OS, Firefox Send) and vestigial side projects they aren't good at (Pocket, Firefox Focus, Firefox Reality, Firefox Lockwise, Firefox Monitor, Mozilla VPN) which only serve to distract Mozilla from working on Firefox.
And since then they've now decided they are an NGO fighting for the Freedom of the Internet or something, even though all Google has to do is pull royalty funding because Firefox's market share is not worth supporting for how small it is, and their entire operation will fall overnight like a house of cards.
It's egregious by average nonprofit levels, particularly one that advocates "ethics" like Mozilla, and considering they laid off a major part of the development team, that's like 20 developers.
Hiring 20 developers to work on your core product so that Google keeps paying you, versus raising the top executive's pay for absolutely no good results other than adding failing side projects. Insanity.
Mark my words.
Remember that Mozilla get's 90%+ of its funding, not from donations, but from Google for being the default search engine. Firefox's market share is now ~4%, dangerously close to where Google might decide that the payout isn't worth it. And close enough where Google thinks they could stop payments without causing any antitrust ire because it's such a small percentage it doesn't make any business sense.
You would think Mozilla executives would take that as a sign that their funding and core product is at stake and they need to double-down on it. Instead, they fire engineering teams and spread into the many side projects in a desperate attempt at diversification that isn't working.
If Google complained, Firefox could say it was a response to anticompetitive behavior. Google would then be a catch-22 where if they cut Firefox's default search funding, they would be inviting lawsuits and investigations. It wouldn't be a healthy relationship but it would have given Firefox a stronger footing than right now.
But Firefox just naively believed adding more fluff like Pocket and paying their executives ludicrous sums of cash would do the trick. You can't do that - you need to get into the mindset that Google wants to kill you and has the power and brand to do it, so you need to fight and stop the bleeding or get killed.
But are they? I doubt you actually have any special knowledge of this. They don't seem to me like they would require so much resources.
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
"Sadly Mozilla's annual report doesn't break down expenses on a per-project basis so it's impossible to know how much of the spending that is on Mozilla's programme is being spent on Firefox and how much is being spent on all these other side-projects.
What you can at least infer is that the side-projects are expensive. Software development always is. Each of the projects named above (and all the other ones that were never announced or that I don't know about) will have required business analysts, designers, user researchers, developers, testers and all the other people you need in order to create a consumer web project.
The biggest cost of course is the opportunity cost of just spending that money on other stuff - or nothing: it could have been invested to build an endowment. Now Mozilla is in the situation where apparently there isn't enough money left to fully fund Firefox development."
Mozilla has definitely failed with most of their side projects, many of them really redundant. And shutting them down is really bad for their reputation.
But they also need to find some funding source that doesn't make them beholden to Google or Microsoft. They have been desperately trying to do that.
Ignoring the fact that many of those side projects probably took one or two part time devs, with the vast majority working on the browser ... only working on Firefox won't get them any revenue.
And no, a subscription model probably won't work. As things stand they would need maybe 30-40 million subscribers paying 10$/year to match Googles money. That's never happening.
I agree. How about we do some executive cuts at Mozilla then? $2.4 million for the top exec over there, maybe to $300K or so which is closer to average for a nonprofit, would be a free $2 million per year. It's not like those executives have been successful in any way to merit that cash.
I'm just stuck with that, I want Firefox to succeed, but the leadership has real problems. And they need cash flow, but side projects aren't doing it, so double-down already on your success and try to claw back slowly - don't flee from what's working.
Maybe even Fight Dirty. I have never figured out why Firefox doesn't pretend to be Chrome on Google websites or try to hide the "Download Chrome" or "Unsupported Browser" popups. Microsoft doesn't care in their quest, Firefox shouldn't either.
The best thing people can do is simply use firefox; the longer we avoid a chromium monoculture; the better - and while mozilla the corp may suffer, as long as the userbase doesn't entirely vanish, they might survive based on the scraps microsoft or google throws them.
Mozilla did not find a qualified candidate and had to make due with a weak one, probably in part due to the low compensation.
When we can and will do better.
FWIW, I heard Mozilla is offering full refunds to everyone that purchased Lockwise, which is way better than you'd get from any for-profit company.
Why do you keep pretending to know this?
Also they laid off a major Firefox engineering division because of tight funds. You can't tell me that the side projects didn't have something to do with that.
Amusingly, the person railing against Mozilla didn't catch that it's free and used "the refunds" as an additional talking point against Mozilla.
You mean like https://www.palemoon.org/ , https://www.waterfox.net/ , https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/ , etc, or something different?
Apple uses anti-competitive tactics to prevent Firefox from competing fairly with Safari on iOS, and Google uses anti-competitive contracts that mandate that Chrome ships on the devices Android vendors sell.
Mozilla has stated that they will add the autofill functionality to Firefox for the system-wide use.
On Android I used KeepassXC and syncthing.
After switching to iOS: Keepassium + NextCloud.
they mention continued pm support for ios, but not android? is that discontinuing?
edit: android pm support is integrated too
Mozilla should really focus on buildind a world class, fast and secure browser. And if this is successfull then start new things.
It looks like they are working on integrating this functionality into the main Firefox apps, which makes more branding sense anyway. As it was the password management was just a feature of the browser on desktop, but a whole different product with its own brand name on mobile.
This bile was brought to you by the "Choose an application to open the ftp link." dialog in Firefox.
I so want to support Mozilla but their moves always seem to be anti-power user. Oh well.
Any recommendations? I'm looking at NordPass but would love to hear about other alternatives.
One of the best free (as in beer) password managers is Bitwarden.
Happy to discover this via another comment in this thread myself!
Why oh why this isn't clearer (or mentioned at all for Android) in the PR I have no idea. It makes a scary/annoying thing tame/nothing.
I suppose we missed the earlier 'deprecated, switch to this' memo?
Anyone know of a password manager that:
a) integrates and is native in MacOS
b) integrates in iOS
c) synchronizes across platforms
d) allows for separation of identities and selection when autofilling in
1) browsers
2) iOS applications
That's bad Mozilla. Lockwise was the reason I started donating.
Also, donations to Mozilla go to the foundation instead of the corporation. The only way to give them some useful money is paying for the services they sell like the VPN service (but also don't forget that Mozilla is just a Mullvad reseller).
What is worse that it keeps doing such things - starting and then killing services one after another; and never learns. So in the end it's nothing great.
You have one job: Build Firefox. Drop the side projects.