Chrome is about to make password management a bit easier

For quite some time now, I’ve used Google’s built-in password manager in Chrome to keep my online life in order. These days, that password vault extends deeper into Android and my phone can quickly auto-fill passwords with a little help from Google as well, so I’m 100% reliant at this point on Google’s assistance when it comes to logging in and out of my personal stuff. The integration throughout Android and Chrome has made it the easy choice at this point for my personal password management so I’ve not felt the need to look elsewhere for keeping up with the litany of passwords I now need to have handy at any given time.

Sure, compared with other services, Google’s baked-in password management is a bit Spartan, but it’s worked very well for me. With that simplistic approach comes a lack of features that, over time, Google continues to slowly add to. For instance, we’ve been able to edit passwords in Google’s web interface at passwords.google.com for some time, but the ability to do so on a device in Chrome has been strangely absent. In Chrome, you can view and delete your saved passwords and even perform a password checkup without leaving your settings menu. But you can’t change or edit that saved password. At least not yet.

Password edits are headed to the Chrome settings menu

Thanks to a bit of digging by Kyle Bradshaw over at 9to5 Google, it looks like we have firm evidence that password editing will be coming to the settings menu in Chrome very soon. According to this commit, the flag is already in place and the feature will likely become a part of the browser settings in the next few versions of Chrome. Right now, the addition of the flag has been merged and we’ll likely see it in the Canary Channel with the next update, though it is unlikely it will do anything just yet.

Edit passwords in desktop settings

Enables passwords editing in desktop settings.

#edit-passwords-in-desktop-settings

Digging a tad deeper, this flag is set to expire by Chrome 88, so it is likely it will be in play long before the flag is set to disappear. I’d wager this could be a feature we end up seeing in Chrome 85 or 86 depending on how hard they push on this one. Since the functionality is already there via the web, it isn’t a pressing matter to have this in place right away, but it will be a very handy thing for users to take advantage of once it does arrive and will allow a much simpler way to deal with password changes in light of data breaches when or if they occur.

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