DRdrewg123·Dec 7, 2017
There is a U2F firefox extension that's open source. Maybe looking at that could be helpful.
https://github.com/prefiks/u2f4moz
In Ask HN: How does the U2F USB protocol work?prefiks
u2f4moz
C2015–2017
prefiks / u2f4moz
u2f4moz
U2F support extension for Firefox
4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
197GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
U2F support extension for Firefox
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, 3:56:07 PM 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 month5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-10-25 14:12:16 UTC to 2017-12-07 22:51:57 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2015 | 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Nov 2015 | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2015 | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2016 | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2016 | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2016 | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2016 | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2016 | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2016 | 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2016 | 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2016 | 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2016 | 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2016 | 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2016 | 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2017 | 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2017 | 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2017 | 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| May 2017 | 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2017 | 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2017 | 2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2017 | 2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2017 | 2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Oct 2017 | 2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Nov 2017 | 2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2017 | 2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesThis extension will become deprecated with Firefox 57 (WebExtensions update).
Unfortunately, it seems that they've failed with shipping U2F support in Firefox at the time, so the browser support seems to be coming to 58 (currently in Nightly). So, your options in November will be either Firefox ESR or switching to Firefox Beta.
EDIT: Source: https://github.com/prefiks/u2f4moz/issues/59#issuecomment-32...
EDIT2: My previous coworker also discovered some high-CPU issues with that add-on on Ubuntu, so be aware of that as well: https://github.com/prefiks/u2f4moz/issues/51
In Testing FIDO U2F security keysThe plan is to support it in 58:
https://github.com/prefiks/u2f4moz/issues/59#issuecomment-32...
In How you can contribute to Firefox 57 successAs for the operating systems: in order to use it on your phone, you'll need to be careful to use a YubiKey with NFC support and have a phone that supports NFC. You won't have any trouble using it on Windows/Ubuntu/macOS.
As for the browsers: Chrome/Chromium works fine. Firefox has an addon that adds security key support[0]. Unfortunately, this addon has a bug which causes high CPU load[1]. Firefox is also working on adding the native support for this, and I think that their ETA is somewhere in the second half of this year to get this thing to work natively. Unfortunately, even with the U2F addon on Firefox, you still won't be able to use it for Gmail, since Google hardcoded its browser to be the only one with U2F support, so you're going to have to change your user agent in order to use it, or default back to your second method of 2FA (Go
Read the rest
ogle Authenticator or something of the sorts). I have no knowledge about the U2F status on Safari and Edge.
As far as I was able to discover, the only service that didn't hardcode Chrome as being the only browser at the moment with U2F support is GitHub, and using YubiKeys with Firefox + U2F addon on GitHub works without any issues (other than the occasional high CPU load that I've already mentioned).
I wrote a short article on my blog about Yubikey usefulness for my usual setup about a year ago[2]. Things changed slightly to the better since then, but not by a lot.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...
[1] https://github.com/prefiks/u2f4moz/issues/51
[2] https://blog.r3bl.me/en/yubikey-review/
U2F support extension for Firefox
6 points · Open discussion