Not necessarily. All you need is browser extensions that mimic the built-in remember password functionality, and a hardware-encrypted USB key that serves as a d

Not necessarily. All you need is browser extensions that mimic the built-in remember password functionality, and a hardware-encrypted USB key that serves as a data store for the browser extensions. That does reduce the USB key to a single point of failure though. That risk could be mitigated with a proprietary key copier. A standard way to generate key pairs for authentication would be a lot better though. (Really, there's no reason we couldn't use SSH private keys with some simple client and server plugins.)