And this annoys me greatly. I want cookies, bookmarks, and passwords to be owned by the system. That way I can switch between browsers with ease, and that would also lower the bar for new browsers to come out.
Agreed. This sounds like a nice user-friendly feature until you realize what a colossal privacy disaster this would be for any malicious app that the user grants these permissions to.
"DerpCo Derpolizer would like to access your stored cookies. This allows us to automatically log into your DerpCo account!" and then bam, they hoover up your login data in an instant and send it off as part of their telemetry.
Much better to have a system like (for example) sign in with Apple where you can easily click a button to have the system authenticate you, but no one gets access to anything without specifically asking for it.
Maybe if you're only using devices from one type of brand. But what if you wanna access those things on a Mac and Google Pixel and an Amazon Kindle. Sure, might not be that much of a mix, but I imagine a decent amount of people have at least one device from a different brand.
I honestly didn't know that was possible before that extension.