Google has been working on a password generator for almost a year now, but the feature is finally built into Chrome’s dev channel release (Version 25). This feature is not enabled by default, so you have to enable it by going to about:flags page in the browser, and you also have to enable Chrome’s built-in password synchronization feature.
Once you sign in Chrome, follow the below steps to enable the built-in Password Generator:
- Visit http://about:flags page.
- Find Enable password generation in the list of experimental features and click Enable button below it.
- Finally, restart the browser.
Now Chrome will start watching for account creation pages with password fields. When it detects one, a pair of keys icon will appear in the password field (see in image). Click on it to generate a password in the password suggestion dialog box. To get a new password simply click on the “Reload” icon seen in the same dialog. When you want to use a generated password, click on “Try it” button to automatically fill in the password fields.
You don’t have to worry about remembering those strong passwords, Chrome will automatically sync the credentials with the rest of your passwords once the account creation process is complete. This way you’ll get the login credentials on your other devices as well.
While it’s nice to have Chrome automatically generate and fill passwords for you, there are certain things to keep in mind while using it:
- Only those account passwords created after the feature is enabled are synced to the cloud.
- If a certain website has disabled automatic filling of passwords, this feature probably won’t work there.
- Another potential danger of using a unified scheme like this is that all your passwords are stored in a single place. Since Chrome doesn’t offer an internal mechanism to secure your Chrome profile, for instance, like Firefox’s master password feature, if someone log into your system account, they would have access to all your passwords.
- Additionally, if you are going to access a site from a device that’s not your own or a browser that’s not Chrome, then you’ll have to remember that jumble of characters.