Secure your saved passwords in Firefox

Firefox can save your login details that you enter on websites, during online banking or forums automatically. The next time you load the same website it will auto fill the details and you simply have to confirm that you want them used to sign in to the website or service. This is convenient of course as you do not have to type your username and password, and also do not really have to remember them as well.Security conscious users on the other hand may want to know more about the feature before they agree that it is a useful one.

Go to Tools --> Options, select Privacy and there the Password Tab. Ever wondered what the View Saved Passwords Tab does? It reveals all your login details in plain text. If you are working alone on this PC fine, but what if your girlfriend ( wife / boss .. ) discovers this little feature, or the next owner of the computer system after you have sold it? It can be really dangerous for your online identity if someone gets access to all of your accounts.

That's where the master password comes into play. If you set a master password Firefox will ask for that password when you want to view the saved passwords or load a website where passwords have been saved previously for. You only have to enter it once for a browsing session, as long as you do not close Firefox it will be remembered so that you can make use of the password functionality of the browser automatically.

Firefox users who do not want the browser to save passwords can disable the feature by unchecking the Remember passwords for sites preference. This can be useful if you are using a password manager for instance that handles the password saving, so that you do not need to use Firefox's default password manager at all.

You can furthermore blacklist sites that you do not want Firefox to save passwords for. This can be an extra security precaution for financial sites, for instance online banking, so that third parties accessing the PC may not use the log in information to log in to the account without supplying user account credentials.

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