[Al-Khwarizmi]

Glad to know I'm not alone. My story is more or less the same (except without password manager). One day I was logging into my ancient Yahoo mail account that I use mostly for unimportant/throwaway things and spam, and I was offered a passkey. I accepted. Next time I logged in I was in a different computer (I regularly use 4-5 computers apart from my phone) and it didn't work. Later, in the original computer, it didn't work either... I guess because I updated something or whatever, no idea, I didn't bother to find out. I'm back to the password now, after having logged in successfully with a passkey exactly zero times after setting it up.

I also don't have a good mental model of how passkeys work. I could get informed. But why should I bother? I'm a busy person. Passwords have worked for me for more than 25 years, and passkeys seem much more fussy and inconvenient (what if I'm traveling and connecting from a random computer in an hotel/airport? I imagine I'll be expected to do something with my phone, as modern cybersecurity seems to be based on trusting everything to the phone -if it gets stolen, bad luck- but what if I have no battery?). I guess I'll have to find out if they force them on us, but if I (a CS PhD and professor) have to actively find out in order to use them, it's going to be chaos with regular users.

[ajdude]

I hate passkeys, only because it seems like every few months I'm trying to help ream them out of my grandmother's computer because she can no longer login to her yahoo email. I've told her countless times, stop saying yes for passkeys but she somehow inevitably gets them enabled on everything while on her desktop and then can't figure out how to access it from her phone.