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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

> For passwords the browser's built in management is inferior to password managers.

Can you expound? After years of using various pw managers I found it being embedded in the browser very useful.

Having your passwords quickly available on every computer, every phone, every OS, and every browser is great. Browser-plugin + app password managers do all 4, while password managers provided by the OS or browser typically fail at one of those. They fail hard, too, by making it difficult to manually extract passwords when you need to. They also tend to lack features like password generation, note storage, etc. It's a completely different experience, really.

> by making it difficult to manually extract passwords

Not true for Firefox. Just go the privacy settings, forms, saved logins.

That’s difficult for a common workflow. Going into “settings” for a password is as goofy as going into settings to look at your calendar.

What common workflow requires accessing usernames and passwords manually?

When the URL of the login form changes, or Firefox doesn't see it, or you need to log in to a mobile app

Similarly easy for Chrome - Settings -> Passwords then once OS password entered you can see each.

Euhm the firefox password manager syncs between devices and even has a standalone app https://lockwise.firefox.com/

Edit: Though Lockwise is relatively new, and currently opt in. And misses features like importing passwords bulk from other password managers

It would be nice if they added a way to import Keepass DBs.

And — at least on iOS — is glacially slow. Startup times of twenty seconds weren't the rule, but not uncommon, when I tried Lockwise last week. Even at the best of times startup took five seconds at least.

Not the parent, but for my own use case, I use password managers for things outside of the browser (office door code, steam, this kind of thing). It might be possible to enter those in the password manager of the browser, I never actually checked, but in any case that's why I use an out of browser password manager

At least with chrome it's always there, you can access on mobile.

At least on Firefox it's always there, you can access on mobile.

One type of incident I came across repeatedly was the browser would not recognize new password setup after password reset. Also found that 2fa systems were being confused for new password accounts.

I agree password managers like last pass fill this void quite nicely. But are not serviced to run on mobile without payment.

Recently I've restored my iPhone and lost all of my passwords in Safari. Now I use LastPass

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