A new experimental feature suggests passwords that are then saved to Chrome

Sep 8, 2014 11:55 GMT  ·  By

Google has been harping about weak passwords for years, recommending people to make them as difficult as possible so their data can be safe at all times, but now it’s urging users to actually come up with ones they can pronounce so they stop forgetting them.

This is an experimental feature that comes along with the latest Chrome Canary update, but that could eventually end up in the stable Chrome version that is used by so many people. The improvements regard password capture, storage and generation.

Googler Francois Beaufort who regularly posts info about web browser development is the one who revealed the new efforts over in the developer-oriented Chrome build.

“The Chrome Password Generation feature we’ve stumbled upon long time ago has now a brand new UI enabled behind the two experimental flags in Chrome Canary,” he writes.

Whenever you go to any sign up page, when you focus on the password field, a new overlay will suggest you a strong, but pronounceable password that will be saved in your Chrome passwords.

The company is clearly trying to push through in the password management tools domain by banking on the fact that people would much rather not visit a different service to get their passwords, but rely directly on Chrome for all issues.

Is Google's tool the next big password manager solution? Probably not

This isn’t the first time that Google is making such an effort. Last year, for instance, it had to do a lot of PR to make sure people weren’t too concerned about how their passwords could be locally accessed without authentication.

The company has to take into account the fact that most often than not there are multiple individuals working on a single computer and they don’t always have different accounts to log in separately, which means Chrome isn’t always as private as one might want.

Google has since fiddled with Chrome a little bit to ask users to re-authenticate and to use a separate encrypted code for the password manager.

Even so, Google is facing a little crisis because while people use their services, they don’t always entrust the company to take good care of their private information, much less passwords, which could explain why the company has been having issues with pushing the password manager to all users.

To make things worse, password managers as a whole are being looked at with quite a bit of concern, even though they are, for the most part, quite well protected.