I think the difference is a browser extension would be portable (and work on locked-down thin clients such as chromebooks where "native" clients are "browser ba

I think the difference is a browser extension would be portable (and work on locked-down thin clients such as chromebooks where "native" clients are "browser based"). Relatedly, I really, really, wish ChromeOS would support smartcards but reading the frustration of the government/military types that have been begging for this feature for years with no real interest by Google is very disappointing. I really like the form factor of YubiKey Neo that simply hangs on your keychain and just sticks into a USB port to become a smartcard. We're also never going to have gpg-agent on ChromeOS so smartcards is pretty much the only way to keep the private keys off the machine.