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35a32c5
(Get the code!)
In response to claims of Chrome's superior password management, I just lived through a use case where keeping the browser's passwords decoupled from the system is much easier to work with.
Short version: Changing Linux distros broke Chromium's access to my saved passwords. Please don't introduce such a fragile dependency in Firefox. I don't want to be locked in to my current OS just to keep using the same cross-platform browser.
Long version:
I had been using Chromium on Chakra Linux for a few years. Chakra is a "half-rolling" distro built around KDE, so it gets the latest KDE stuff faster than most other distros. Then I lived somewhere with metered Internet access for a couple months, so I switched to Firefox, using the lazy tab loading on start-up to reduce bandwidth use.
(off topic: It was really annoying manually importing passwords to Firefox since it doesn't have the feature. I miss Chrome's process-per-tab model that keeps the rest of the browser fast when one tab is busy. At least NoScript mostly keeps tabs from getting too busy in the first place. Also Firefox's Tree Style Tab add-on makes it much easier to keep a zillion tabs organized.)
Now that I'm living somewhere with unmetered Internet again, I've decided it's about time to do some distro-hopping and see how things have changed. Switching between various distros and desktop environments/window managers, Firefox has consistently given me access to my passwords via the master password, even when Firefox's version got shuffled back and forth.
Eventually, I ended up settling on OpenSUSE 13.1 using KDE, but apparently with a slightly older and incompatible version of kwallet. I just opened Chromium for the first time since July. Since all my log-ins have expired, it wants to access saved passwords. However, despite using the same browser and desktop environment I had been in July, with both within a year of the other, Chromium cannot access my saved passwords. I'm stuck with kwallet giving me an "Error code -4: Unsupported file format revision" message. So much for Chromium. Maybe it'll work again on OpenSUSE 13.2 in a couple months?
I guess I'll use Chromium for all the complicated "web 2.0" stuff that Firefox's single process chokes on. Firefox still seems best for not randomly losing abilities and for being widely extensible.