HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
google
u2f-ref-code
JavaScript2014–2017
google / u2f-ref-code · Archived

u2f-ref-code

U2F reference implementations

2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
590GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

U2F reference implementations

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 11:56:56 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-10-21 16:44:25 UTC to 2017-07-24 23:07:35 UTC.

012014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
Aside from the obvious reason why (iOS support looks unlikely to ever happen), I imagine seeing the list of supported browsers read nothing but "Chrome" discourages implementation too. Though U2F's javascript API situation makes a lack of adoption a bit of a mixed blessing. Because sites need to include browser-specific code to access a browser's U2F support, that means any site adding support for Chrome right now will have to go back and modify their code to add support for Firefox when it comes, etc. (From the spec: "RPs [Relying Parties, i.e. web pages using U2F] interact with the FIDO client through a MessagePort [WEBMESSAGING] object. [...] This specification does not describe how such a port is made available to RP web pages, as this is (for now) implementation and browser dependent.") Google and Yubico provide an example wrapper ar
Read the rest
ound the Chrome-specific method for getting access to Chrome's U2F messageport (at https://github.com/google/u2f-ref-code/blob/master/u2f-gae-d... in the function u2f.getMessagePort), but the wrapper gives up if it's not running in Chrome (the else branch just tries hitting the old Chrome extension by hardcoded chrome-extension:// URL). Even if Google's wrapper someday adds support for other browsers, every site will need to update its copy of the wrapper before that site will support the other browsers. If very many sites were adding U2F support right now, I suspect a lot of them would remain Chrome-only even as more browsers added U2F support. Maybe if adoption only happens after more browsers already have their U2F support available, more sites will end up supporting those browsers than if it was getting adoption right now.
In Soft U2F: A software-based U2F authenticator for macOS

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.