Google Chrome: Turn off Password Save

One of the first things I do when I install Firefox is to disable the password save option. I have no intention of letting my username/password pairs get saved automatically for others to view later on.

In Google Chrome, to disable the save-password option, click on the little spanner icon on the top right (beside the address bar), select Options, click on the Minor Tweaks tab and select Never save passwords. If you want to view passwords already saved, click on “Show saved passwords”!

turn off password saving in google chrome

UPDATE: Commentator Jim has this useful information to add in the comments section.

Here’s a scenario no one has discussed.

1. Allow Chrome to import information from a previously existing Firefox installation
2. Look at Wrench(Spanner)/Options/Minor Tweaks/Show Saved Passwords
3. Select a site, then click “Show Password”

Your saved password from Firefox is displayed in plain text. Chrome has read your password from Firefox, then made it available to anyone in possession of your machine. Physical security is still the most important aspect of security! We really need the master password now!

Google Chrome Browser is Out

Google released its browser named Chrome this afternoon. After downloading the tiny file (474kb) and installing it, I tried visiting a few sites and they all rendered very fast. CSS support is great in this browser.

Then, I visited my website to see what the user-agent string would be displayed as. I was on Windows XP at the moment. The user-agent string was this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Okay, I tweaked my browser display code to recognize the Chrome browser, so you can check it here. You should get something like this:

google chrome browser detect on aruljohn.com

The browser comes with Adobe Flash Player 9 out of the box (unlike Firefox), so you don’t have to install it. Java runtime isn’t installed and I’m not sure if that can be done at the moment.

One of the things I like most about this apart from the speed is the Chrome Inspector. Right-click on any page and select Inspect Element. It will show you a multi-tabbed display of the DOM elements, beginning with html and body. This is very useful for debugging.

chrome > elements

Selecting the Resources shows a graphical display of the time and size of each components of the current webpage.

chrome > resources

Yes, there are Firefox add-ons/extensions for this, but I think its great that Google included this in its web browser. Its a boon to those who use Firebug on a daily basis.

As of now, there is only a Windows version, Mac users will have to wait for a little more while.

Go ahead and download it here.