Bill Lampos

This is the first post of a did you know series. Nothing special but it might help some people with basic problems or in general point out some things that are not always obvious.

Did you know that when Mozilla Firefox asks you whether or not to save (remember) a username / password pair, it actually saves it as raw data?

What we mean is that a friend of yours, while you are at the kitchen making coffee, is able to see all your passwords by just clicking:

Tools -> Options -> Security -> Saved Passwords -> Show Passwords

The same stands for a colleague at the office, who (for his / her own reasons) wants to access your private data.

To protect your data and your browser from unauthorized use, you must create a master password by clicking:

Tools -> Options -> Security -> Create Master Password

The drawback of this action is that Firefox will prompt you for your master password every time you restart it (as an application); so you will have to do some extra typing. By setting up a master password, all the passwords in Firefox are protected (encryption applied).