Google wants Chrome to become your preferred password manager

As a heavy Chrome user, the password manager that is built into the Chrome browser – which can be easily accessed by navigating to passwords.google.com – has always been my preference when it comes to saving a website’s login info. Originally, all I could expect the Chrome Password Manager to do was prompt me to save a password for a new site I was visiting or auto-complete a previously-saved password for a site I was returning to.

That changed a few months ago when an experimental flag became available that allowed users to manually save a password to Chrome without having to visit that site in the first place. This discovery was made by Redditor u/Leopeva64-2 who found this to be working in Chrome Canary. Since then, that feature has become available in the stable version of Chrome, but it is still behind a flag that you have to manually turn on via chrome://flags/#add-passwords-in-settings to give it a try.

Well, it looks like more development is being done to that feature, as the same Redditor now points out that in Chrome Canary version 101 there is a new field where you can add a note while saving a password. This can be very helpful if you wanted to have additional information available such as the security questions and answers you used for that site, or even a third login field like a reference number that Chrome wouldn’t normally be able to capture. This same field will also be available on passwords you have already saved.

It is unclear if this notes field will be encrypted the same way as your username and password currently are. As this is an experimental feature, there is currently no help documentation on it, but I would expect this to be cleared up by the time this is released to the public. We will be watching this feature as it moves from Canary to Stable and will report back once it becomes widely available.