[Wowfunhappy]

You're forever locked into Google Chrome!

I realize this is becoming an increasingly minor problem in the modern world, but it still bothers me. I don't know what future situations I'll find myself in, and I don't want to be locked out of all my accounts.

• What if a new browser comes out that's actually better than Chrome? (I don't want to admit to myself how unlikely this actually is.)

• What happens if I'm using a Windows 10 S device, or a locked-down library computer, or a Wii U, or some other weird gadget with a non-Chrome browser?

[quicklime]

I recently starting using Firefox again, and getting my passwords out of Chrome was by far the most difficult part of the process for me. A few things I learned:

Chrome has a feature to export passwords to a CSV file, but I had to enable it via a chrome:flag, so who knows if/when support for this will disappear. This created a bit of a sense of urgency for me, as Google aggressively removes features that they don't want to support.

My employer MITMs all web traffic, so I would never log into my Google account from work. They also have an ridiculously strict password change policy (every 3 months). But having a password manager on my phone lets me store passwords for my various work-related accounts somewhere, which makes each password change fairly easy, and also lets me log into certain work-related apps/sites (e.g. Slack) from home.

If you have multiple accounts on a single website, it's a bit easier to do in a password manager (at least Keepass or Bitwarden).

Chrome is a web browser, so it only remembers passwords to websites. If you have passwords that don't map to a website - e.g. hard drive encryption password, a pgp/ssh key, a wifi password), it's a bit easier to do in a password manager.

Some password managers have OTP generators built-in, which can be convenient.

[yoklov]

Does firefox not import passwords from chrome as part of the profile import? It's... certainly supposed to.

EDIT: Oh, you probably didn't mean getting them out and into firefox, you probably wanted to use something different to avoid the same issue (but with firefox) if you switch browsers again in the future.

[quicklime]

Actually, at the time, I would've been perfectly happy to have just imported the passwords into Firefox!

But I don't think it is able to import them, at least not on my machine. I'm using the latest Chromium/Firefox on the latest Ubuntu, and I just had another look. When I select the option to import data from another browser, I get a dialog that says:

Import Preferences, Bookmarks, History, Passwords and other data from: Chromium

When I select Chromium, I see a list of things I can import:

Select which items to import: [x] Cookies [x] Browsing History

For some reason, "Passwords" does not appear in the list, and when I browse to a site in Firefox, it doesn't use the password that Chromium had stored.

Maybe this is an OS-dependent thing?

[excalibur]

> What if a new browser comes out that's actually better than Chrome? (I don't want to admit to myself how unlikely this actually is.)

Firefox has a nifty feature where it doesn't send ALL your data to Google, you could try that.

[Wowfunhappy]

I should mention, I'm currently using Firefox on Windows and Safari on macOS; Chrome is gone from my life. I really like Firefox following their Quantum update; it feels super speedy!

But, I was kinda putting myself in the mindset of the GP. They're currently using Chrome's password manager, so they clearly prefer Chrome, and while Safari and Firefox have advantages, there's no overwhelming need for anyone to switch right now. For the sake of a democratized web, I hope that changes some day in the future.