State of U2F in Firefox

Users of the Nextcloud U2F app may have noticed that the app warns that only Chrome natively supports U2F and an addon is necessary for Firefox:

Install the “U2F Support Add-on” on Firefox to use U2F, this is not needed on Chrome.

However, if you search for that addon, you’ll quickly notice that it’s not compatible with the current version of Firefox:

Does that mean we cannot use U2F tokens on Firefox anymore? Yes and no. This addon is not usable anymore but native U2F support has been added to Firefox Nightly a few months ago:

There's experimental #U2F token support in @Firefox 57 & @FirefoxNightly behind the pref "security.webauth.u2f"; Thanks @ttaubert & @qDot! pic.twitter.com/CZH2Z9S7Ap

— J.C. Jones (@jamespugjones) 25. September 2017

I tried it right away and it seemed to work with the Nextcloud U2F app. You can use U2F on Firefox Quantum now, but it is disabled by default and you have to enable it in the settings.

The good news is that Firefox will soon support hardware tokens by default, making U2F available for everyone. Once this is officially supported, we’ll remove the Firefox warning from the Nextcloud U2F app.