Chrome Adds Support For FreeDesktop Secret Service & Better Wayland Window Dragging

Written by Michael Larabel in Google on 13 September 2024 at 06:29 AM EDT. 5 Comments
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The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser merged two notable features yesterday for Linux users.

First, Chrome has landed FreeDesktop.org Secret Service Interface (org.freedesktop.Secret.Service) support with SecretPortalKeyProvider. The change explains:
"Add SecretPortalKeyProvider

This change implements an OSCrypt async client using the Freedesktop Secret Service interface. Both gnome-keyring and KWallet expose this interface, so we may eventually remove both of those synchronous backends."

FreeDesktop.org's Secret Service API allows applications to store secrets securely within a service running in the user's login session. The documentation explains:
"The Secret Service stores a secret along with a set of lookup attributes. The attributes can be used to look up and retrieve a secret at a later date. The lookup attributes are not treated as secret material, and the service may choose not to encrypt attributes when storing them to disk.

This API was designed by GNOME and KDE developers with the goal of having a common way to store secrets. Its predecessors are the desktop-specific APIs used by GNOME Keyring and KWallet."

Great seeing Google Chrome supporting the FreeDesktop.org Secret Service interface.

The other notable merge is supporting the xdg-toplevel-drag protocol within the Ozone Wayland code. This replaces the earlier extended-drag-unstable-v1 protocol. This Wayland protocol enhances normal drag and drop with support for moving a window at the same time. This can be useful in the case of Google Chrome and web browsers or other tabbed applications at large for allowing attaching/detaching a tab from a window and dragging tabs to/off a window, and other similar movements. The xdg-toplevel-drag protocol was firmed up a few months ago in Wayland Protocols and now supported rather punctually by Chrome.
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