Show saved passwords option in Firefox

18 Jul 2004

Checked into yesterday’s (2004-07-17) aviary (Firefox 1.0) branch: an option to show/display saved passwords.

To check it out, grab yesterday’s (2004-07-17) nightly branch build, go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy, and select the Saved Passwords option.

Click on View Saved Passwords to see the Password Manager and you’ll see a Show Passwords button at the bottom right. That’s new.

You get a confirmation dialog (supposedly because showing your passwords is an important event). I think the intended use of the confirmation dialog is to save you from inadvertently showing your passwords to someone looking over your shoulder.

Screenshot of confirmation dialog when clicking Show Passwords

And your passwords are then shown in the plain text glory (mine are “pinked out” in the screenshot below, of course).

Screenshot of Password Manager with passwords showing

Looking at my list of passwords, I am beginning to think I’m not a very secure person (identical passwords for different accounts, using the same passwords for long periods, and passwords shorter than 8 characters).

11 Responses to Show saved passwords option in Firefox

Jafe Mourner

July 20th, 2004 at 5am

This blog rules ^_^.

Nice screenshots!

Patricia

July 20th, 2004 at 3pm

Now, this is an incredibly useful feature! I agree with Greyrest that some passwords are just a standard necessity to save and protect our settings and not much for the sensitivity of information inside a given account, but still I try to keep my passwords as difficult as possible to crack and use different passwords for different wished levels of protection. Although I´m pretty good at remembering which passwords go where, sometimes I get trapped inside my own system and this tool will be useful in these cases. Thanks for the tip.

grayrest

July 19th, 2004 at 5am

My point is how often security matters on web sites. For 70% of all registrations I use the same 6 character password. Why? Because the only purpose of the password is to prevent someone from changing my settings.

I don’t value most of my information very much, so I find most logins to be more annoying than helpful, but there are many people out there who want to protect their personal information as much as possible and the web sites cater to those people in order to engender trust.

In short, most passwords shouldn’t be there, so I don’t feel bad about not following proper secuirty measures. There are exceptions, but it’s usually pretty obvious where those are and they can be dealt with as needed.

mitja

September 3rd, 2004 at 3pm

In what file are those passwords stored? I’m trying to migrate to USB stick. Which files should I transfer so that i’ll still have saved passwords?

Daniel

September 8th, 2004 at 4am

pease help i have firefox 0.9.1 and i havent the “show passwords” button.

i need see my passwords because since i removed cache and cookies firefox dont log me in.

im very trouble with this, i can see the site and the username in the password manager but the show password button isnt there, and i havent another way to recover some of the passwords that i have stored with mozilla

Edd

January 17th, 2005 at 8am

pease help i have firefox 0.9.1 and i havent the “show passwords” button.

i need see my passwords because since i removed cache and cookies firefox dont log me in.

You have 2 options.

1-Downlaod Mozilla which comes with the show passwords thing.

2- Upgrade to Firefox 1.0

Isuggest the second

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vuzman

January 19th, 2005 at 10pm

This is a huge security hole. I simply cannot believe that this has been implemented into Firefox as it is, and there’s a very good reason that this is not available in the other browsers.

If you’re ever going to let Firefox remember your passwords, DO set a master password! Or else anyone with access to your computer can see all your passwords. And if you’re not too big on security, he will have, or can guess, the passwords for everything else in your life.

To the developers: Think before you implement. Not every new feature is desirable…