Now you can view passwords and add notes without opening settings
There are plenty of reasons you should be using a password manager, but perhaps the best argument is that you already have one that automatically syncs with your Android phone if you’re using Chrome. Lately, Google has been working to improve the built-in password manager in its browser by adding features like biometric authentication on Mac and Windows and a useful way to add notes to your saved passwords. Now, Chrome for desktop is making it even easier to access saved passwords and add notes with a sleek new popup menu.
This new menu is accessed by clicking the key icon that shows up in your address bar when you’re on a site where you’ve saved a password. Before, this would just show your username for the website and let you delete saved credentials — for anything else, you’d have to click the Manage Passwords button and be redirected to the main passwords menu in Chrome’s settings. Now, you can copy the username and either copy or view the saved password directly from this popup menu.
Chrome’s old password popup menu (left) vs. the new menu with extra features (right)
To get this new interface, you currently have to enable a feature flag found at chrome://flags/#revamped-password-management-bubble, then restart your browser for the changes to take effect. The flag is available on all three Chrome release channels, including the stable build, but the feature only works when you enable the flag on Chrome Beta or Chrome Canary at the moment.
As reported by browser expert Leopeva64, the popup also gives you an easy way to add notes to saved passwords. This feature, which became widely available earlier this month, is useful for remembering when you last updated your password or giving yourself hints about security questions, for example. The notes are saved alongside your passwords, so it’s likely they are encrypted as well, though Google has not confirmed this yet.
Chrome’s offering is already one of the best password managers on Android, but features like this are helping to separate it from the pack. Eventually, Google’s Credential Manager passkey system might even bring us into a passwordless future.
