It is becoming more and more important to use long and strong passwords to protect our data. And, to help us remember them, it is necessary to have a password manager. There are many ways to save our passwords safely: using OpenSource programs, services like LastPass or, the simplest and most widely used, taking advantage of password managers in web browsers, such as Chrome , which allow us to save and synchronize them with the cloud. Although this tends to raise quite a few controversies.
Far from entering the debate about whether or not it is good for a company like Google to be in charge of saving our passwords, what cannot be argued is that, through Chrome, the company wants to make our lives easier. Currently, Chrome allows us to synchronize the passwords that we save with our Google account. In this way, when we log in to a website, the username and password are saved in the browser, it is sent to Google and we can access this login from any computer or device where we log in. Of course, as long as we have the password synchronization activated.
If we use Chrome on our computer, surely we have synchronization enabled. However, when we use the browser on a computer that is not ours, activating it is not recommended, since our data could be accessible to other people. In addition, having the passwords saved locally on the PC is not the safest thing we can do either.
Google has been looking for a way to allow us to have our passwords available in the browser without having to have the browser synchronization activated. And this function, finally, is coming very soon.
Chrome will be able to use passwords without syncing them
As of Chrome 89 , the browser will allow us to have all the passwords that we have saved in our Google account at hand without having to have them synchronized. In a way, what the browser will do is check our passwords “streaming” and allow us to log in with them when necessary.
In this way, Chrome will have two password managers. First of all, the local manager, which will be saved on our PC (out of Google’s reach), and on the other hand the passwords that we have in the cloud. If we enter the ” chrome: // settings / passwords ” section we can see the passwords saved locally, and activate the option to access the passwords saved in Google without synchronizing them.
Once the option is activated for the first time, we can start using this new function. When we go to log in to a website we can see that the logins appear, the same as always. Those that we have saved locally in the browser (synchronized) will appear without any symbol, while those that are saved in Google, through this new function, without synchronization will have the Google logo next to them.
As always, we will choose the one we want to auto-complete the username and password and that’s it.
Activate the experimental function
In order to use this new function it is necessary to activate it from the Chrome flags. And, in addition, we must be using version 89 of Chrome Canary. To do this, we will write ” chrome: // flags ” in the browser’s search bar, we will search for these two entries and mark them as “Enabled”:
- Enable the account data storage for passwords
- Enable IPH for the account data storage for passwords
We restart Chrome and that’s it. From now on we can access our Google passwords without having them synchronized in the browser. Of course, this will only work if we have an Internet connection, since, contrary to how it happens through the synchronization function, now nothing is saved locally in the browser.
This feature will surely reach all browser users when Chrome 89 reaches its stable version. However, at the moment Google has not made many more statements about it, so we will have to wait a little longer to know in detail how it works and when it will arrive.