Show saved passwords option in Firefox
July 18, 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.
And your passwords are then shown in the plain text glory (mine are “pinked out” in the screenshot below, of course).
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).
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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.
Posted by: grayrest on July 19, 2004 5am