Apple takes over third-party Apple Passwords autofill extension for Firefox
Over the last few years, Apple has steadily been building password manager-style features into macOS and iOS, including automatic password generation, password breach detection, and more. Starting with this year’s updates—iOS 18 and macOS 15 Sequoia—Apple broke all that functionality out into its own Passwords app, making it all even more visible as a competitor to traditional password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden.
One area where Apple has lagged behind its platform-agnostic competitors is in browser support. Users could easily autofill passwords in Safari on macOS, and Apple did support a basic extension for the Windows versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge via iCloud for Windows. But the company only added a Chrome extension for macOS users in the summer of 2023, and it has never supported non-Chromium browsers at all.
That has finally changed, at least for Firefox users running macOS—Apple has an officially supported Passwords extension for Firefox that supports syncing and autofilling passwords in macOS Sonoma and macOS Sequoia. Currently, the extension doesn’t support older versions of macOS or any versions of Firefox for Windows or Linux. When you install the extension in Firefox on a Mac that’s already synced with your iCloud account, all you should need to do to sign in is input a six-digit code that macOS automatically generates for you. As with the Chromium extension, there’s no need to re-sign in to your iCloud account separately.
To enable this functionality, it looks like Apple has taken ownership of a third-party extension that supported autofilling Apple Passwords in Firefox—a GitHub page for the original extension is still available but says that Apple “are now the sole owners in charge of maintaining their own official iCloud Passwords extension.” That extension supports the versions of Windows that can run the official iCloud for Windows app, suggesting that Apple ought to be able to add official Windows support for the extension at some point down the line.
