[quadrifoliate]

> The thread here seems like a dumpster fire to me. Everyone here is worrying about lock-in to an open standard.

There is a certain fiddling-while-Rome-burns quality to this comment. The blog post is not about the open standard, it explicitly focuses on a specific company's products. People are naturally worried about this even though the standard may be open, because we are at historically high levels of platform lock-in from megacorps. Gmail is the new "Blue E". Getting locked out of your Google account in 2022 is probably much worse than not being able to use a different browser in 2001.

Sure, HTTP is also an "open standard". How many real browsers exist that can play DRM-encumbered media? You'll find that the answer is "very few – basically anything made by Apple, Google, or Mozilla" (perhaps Brave as well, which has an ex-Mozilla founder and uses Google-funded tech).

The best way to get people to adopt the open standard is to actually showcase uses of it that are not just a single company's product, not call them names for being worried about lock-in.

[stavros]

Right, but that's like Gmail coming out and people complaining about another proprietary product locking people in. There are two issues with the current comments:

1. Absolutely nobody currently uses WebAuthn. I'm extremely excited about the popularization, which, unfortunately, requires big players to get behind it.

2. The comments feel very "oh my God this car I'm driving is heading towards the edge of the cliff even faster". Don't use Google, they're unreliable and evil. While I'm very excited about Passkeys popularizing WebAuthn, I don't think anyone should ever rely on Google for authentication, so just don't use them and use Bitwarden instead, if/when it supports Passkeys.

A vendor coming up with an implementation of a great standard isn't the problem, the fact that people use it is the problem.