Mozilla is already working on improving security with Firefox by integrating support for Windows Hello

If you have a relatively modern Windows 10 PC, the most likely thing is that you have the Windows Hello access system. It is a biometric identification system that is included in Windows 10, and that offers us more convenience and security when it comes to logging into our devices.

Thanks to it we can dispense with passwords when logging into applications, when accessing protected content, or even when entering web service accounts through the browser. By default, it can be set to work with all services and applications that use Microsoft accounts and / or Azure Active Directory accounts, but any application and site can be integrated. And that’s what Mozilla does right now.

How they count on Techdows , the company is working on adding support for Windows Hello in Firefox . A possibility that is already real in version 66 of Firefox destined to the tests (the stable version of Firefox at this point is 65.0.1).

The arrival of Windows Hello support to Firefox is a very interesting improvement, since it allows access to Microsoft services and utilities such as Outlook.com, Office 365, OneDrive … without having to use the classic password .

Windows Hello: what it is and how to configure it to unlock Windows 10 with your face

In fact, JC Jones, Web Authentication editor, remembers that WebAuthn, the open standard to identify yourself in different services with the browser without using a password, no longer works in the Windows Insider compilations. WebAuthn was presented by W3C and FIDO Alliance with the support of Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, companies that started to implement it in their browsers.

“WebAuthn no longer works on internal Windows compilations, since compatible security keys are no longer available through the USB HID interface. (Basically, u2f-hid-rs [1] will no longer be compatible with Windows 10+ ) “.

“Sometime this spring, Firefox 66 or 67 (and ESR 60) should use the Windows Hello API when they are available to interact with web authentication, otherwise no devices will be detected and we will have a regression of Windows features “

Firefox in its next public version could thus count on the Windows Hello API so that users can interact with web authentication . This will allow users to log in to websites and applications without having to type the password and using only their biometric parameters.