If we want to maintain our security on the network it is necessary to use complex and secure passwords. The problem is that these passwords are often difficult to remember. And if we use different passwords for each website where we register, then much more. Luckily, there are more and more solutions designed to help us save all our passwords in the easiest and most secure way possible so that we do not have to worry about them. And the new Firefox 85 will bring an important novelty that will encourage us even more to leave all passwords in the hands of our browser.
Today we can find a wide variety of password managers. On the one hand, we can find open managers, such as KeePass or Bitwarden , which give us the reliability of OpenSource software, on the other hand, commercial managers such as 1Password or LastPass, more complete, but paid and totally opaque, and, in addition, browsers web like Chrome, Edge, and of course Firefox.
The password managers that we can find in web browsers are the most interesting. These create a secure database to store our passwords and allow us to log in with one click on any website that we have saved. In addition, they are also responsible for synchronizing these passwords with the cloud so that we can always have them at hand on any PC and on our mobile devices.
The main problem that we find is when changing from one password manager to another, and that is that most of the services are not compatible with each other. Although with the new Firefox 85 things will change.
Import passwords in Firefox 85
Firefox has been working on a complete password manager for a long time. Right now, Mozilla’s OpenSource browser is the one that best allows us to work with our passwords, and it is not even close to Chrome . Little by little, Mozilla continues to look for new ways to improve its password manager, and the new one, which is coming very soon, focuses on allowing us to import passwords from other services.
This new feature, which has been optional since mid-2020 (with the arrival of Firefox 80 ) makes the browser compatible with the lists of passwords generated by other programs such as KeePass or Bitwarden, among many others. To be precise, Firefox will be able to load the passwords from a CSV file exported by these other programs.
This new feature will be available by default to everyone as of January 26, 2020, the launch date of Firefox 85. But if we don’t want to wait, we can activate it right now by following the following steps:
- Write in the address bar “about: config”.
- Find the entry “signon.management.page.fileImport.enabled”.
- Double click on it to set its value to “true” (or “false”, if we want to deactivate it).
- Ready.
Beware of passwords
This function can be useful when changing the password manager. However, we must be very careful when working with this type of document, since the CSV files that are generated are not encrypted . This means that anyone who gets this file will be able to have full access to all of our passwords.
We must handle these types of files very carefully. And once the passwords are imported, delete the CSV safely to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
