biometric authentication systems are already a reality in a large number of devices. Gone are the days when high-security installations and systems were the exclusive legacy, as cinemas are no doubt at least partly responsible for this type of security system gaining traction long before our everyday devices began to have them.

Today, it is already difficult to find smartphones that do not allow the user to identify himself with a fingerprint or face analysis through the camera. Interestingly, some computers also started to include biometric authentication systems many years ago, but it was only a small minority and only much laterthey finally became popular.

This logically led to the use of biometric authentication systems is much more common in smartphone applications than in desktop software, something that, on the other hand, is of less interest to the user… in short, a whale nibbling its own tail. And of course, this means that when we switch from a smartphone to a PC, we have to go back to using PIN codes, passwords and other operations that, on mobile, only require putting a finger on the sensor or giving our smile to the camera.

A clear example of this, and quite common in my case, is wanting to reset a password saved in Google Chrome. But, and this is the good news, as we can read in Chrome Unboxed, it will change since then Google Chrome is preparing to allow the use of biometric authentication to access saved passwords. A method that would be an alternative to the current protection that uses a PIN configured in Windows. In addition, biometric identification will allow you to activate automatic data completion, another very practical function.

There are no signs, at least for now, when this feature will make it to not only the stable version of Google Chrome and potentially the rest of the Chromium derivatives, because at the moment it’s only in the Chromium Gerrit repository and in addition, its default mode is disabled, so users who want to test the feature must enable the flag #biometric-authentication-for-filling