twice<\/em> is more guessable, but still no other means to get there!<\/p>\nOpera’s ability to store multiple passwords for a single username seemed a misfeature to me. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to have this feature, and it made selecting the correct credentials difficult – you had to select the correct item from two choices that are indistinguishable. Internet Explorer’s prompt to warn you that you were choosing to override the password makes the most sense to me, and it has saved me a few times.<\/p>\n
Firefox’s ability to display passwords in cleartext appears to be a terrible security hole. Don’t let me play on your computer for even two minutes if you use Firefox – I’ll have your passwords for all your favourite sites and, if you are like much of the world, you use the same password for your PayPal and eTrade accounts too.<\/p>\n
I have largely ignored Safari – I don’t have enough information to really judge it. <\/p>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
My hypothesis was wrong. When I looked at the browsers with more care, I noticed key differences in their functionality.<\/p>\n
None of the browsers I looked at passed with flying colours.<\/p>\n
Internet Explorer is the most likely to suffer from the original problem. It has reasonable usability and security. It does require you to learn a couple of tricks, but they are useful throughout Windows (e.g. Windows explorer and Internet Eplorer’s address bars and also file-completion in the file-choosers)<\/p>\n
Opera’s power is the greatest and its usability is the worst. If you stick to the default scope, it also lets you suffer the worst – typing in a correct password on the opening page doesn’t solve the problem.<\/p>\n
Firefox is probably gets the most points for usability, and discards them again with its security.<\/p>\n
Each of these browsers is evolving. Maybe they will all improve over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The password management facilities of three common browsers are compared and contrasted<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31,25,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}