Reveal a Password in your Browser with a Simple Trick

We are all often told to try and stay security conscious online, and passwords is one of the most important parts of creating a more secure environment for yourself. Different lengths, multiple character types, different login details for every site. This is especially the case when there are multiple users on the same machine.

Personally, I have so many different passwords, that I’d have to sit there with a giant piece of paper every time I wanted to log into a website if it wasn’t for ability to save them on your PC so you don’t have to remember them. These days, most browsers offer to store your login details for you and there are some great dedicated password managers around, such as Lastpass to make filling in forms and logins even easier.

When you type passwords in to web browsers, they are often hidden behind bullets or asterisks, which is fine when you know the password, but if you can’t remember and it’s being filled in automatically, you have to dig into the options of the browser or utility to find out what it is. There are plenty of tools to reveal passwords for you such as Bullet Pass View by Nir Sofer, but the other day I came across a very simple way to reveal a password in your browser without having to use any additional software at all. This was tested successfully on Chrome 18, Opera 11 and Firefox 11. The process is broadly the same for all three but I’m using Chrome to demonstrate.

Firstly, go to a web page where you have to log in such as Google, Raymond.cc or eBay, and hopefully your saved details will be entered from either the browser or password manager. The password will be hidden behind the bullets…

 Double click on the password to highlight it, then right click on it and select ‘Inspect element’. In Firefox you will then need to click on the HTML button to view the html content.

Once you are viewing the html content for the page, the line for the password input should already be highlighted, as shown below. Look on that line for the value type=”password”. Double click on ‘password’, delete it and then press Enter.

Look back to the login details and your password will be revealed!

This works in pretty much all windows where a password is hidden behind bullets and is just a simple trick to quickly reveal the password that has already been saved to the browser or password manager. This is also useful if you have very long passwords you enter yourself and would like to see what’s being typed in to avoid mistakes. It may only save a few seconds over getting it yourself, but is still a handy thing to know.