Casey Liss

They're way better than everything we had before.

But from the actual user experience of using them in practice most of the time...

It's just another thing that gets added to the pile of things that we are supposed to keep track of and have in a password manager or something and try to share maybe with mixed success with family members or coworkers or whatever.

It can be done very well.

In an ideal implementation of passkeys, both on the platform side and on the website side, they're better than everything else.

The main downside with passkeys so far is that the way that I see them being implemented by websites and services is not as a replacement for passwords, but as a replacement for two-factor.

So it's actually just taking this other complex thing and replacing it with a different complex thing.

Now, the security of a passkey is way better than most of those other systems or alternatives to it.

But

the user experience of it is still really clunky in a lot of places and ideally it would replace the entire login like ideally you could just have it like automatically if you have a passkey for the site you're on and it shows you a login screen it just prompts you to use it and it logs you in all the way that would be the ideal case

And you occasionally see sites like that, but it's not the common case.

So that's kind of my kind of mixed opinion of them is that they are a great technology that solves a lot of problems.

They also create a lot of inconvenience in certain contexts.

And they are not really making logins on websites that much easier in practice, not because of their inherent technology, but because of the implementation decisions of those websites.

Yeah, I think the main thing to keep in mind here is that when you look at where RAM goes on a Mac...

Mac OS is not what you have to worry about.

What you have to worry about is all the third-party apps, especially apps that use things like the web frameworks, like Electron and stuff like that.

So you have Chrome itself.

Chrome is a big resource hog compared to Safari in most ways.

And then all the Electron-based apps, they just gobble up RAM like crazy.