What if password auto fill won't work?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com.
It's a very common recommendation from folks such as myself:
use a password manager. They're wonderful.
They remember things for you.
They automatically fill passwords and usernames for
you... Except when they don't.
Here's the question that came in.
"I'm finally using a password vault. The problem.
It won't fill in on some sites,
so I find I have to remember those passwords anyway.
What's the point?"
To be clear, you do not have to remember those passwords.
I actually have several sites that I
visit on a fairly regular basis that
the autofill, for whatever reason, doesn't work, and I'll get to that in a moment.
I have alternative ways of getting the password and the username from LastPass,
in my case, that I think will
work for most other password vaults.
What I want to do is describe the problem and then show you some.
Of the alternatives to just letting the.
Password manager auto fill things for you.
The problem is very simple.
The intent of most password managers is that since they have your username and
password, they will automatically fill it in
for the site you're visiting.
When you encounter a sign in page
on that site, generally, all you really have to do then is click okay.
Or login or whatever.
In some cases, the password manager might
even click that button for you.
So by simply visiting the login page magic happens and you're already logged in.
However, for a variety of reasons, that doesn't always work.
The reasons come down to two different camps.
One is really misguided site designers who
believe that there's a security risk
in allowing any kind of automated insertion of passwords and usernames.
They prevent essentially, password vaults, from being used almost exclusively.
Which is really unfortunate, because, in my
opinion, that's a huge, huge disservice to their users.
It prevents them from easily using tools that would, in fact, keep them safer.
The other side of the coin, though
is that website design is very complex,
and honestly, there's no standard for what a login page should look like or
how it should be encoded in the HTML behind the scenes.
What that means is that password vaults
all have to kind of sort of figure out, Is this or is this not a password field?
Is this or is this not a login?
Should I fill it in? If I should fill it... do that,
but if I can't, or if I'm not certain, then don't fill it in.
And it's that "not certain" part that
turns out to be really important, because
while you want them to fill in
automatically for those sites that have
login pages, you don't want them to mistakenly
fill into something that isn't a login
page, because that then could in fact expose your information.
So they err on the side of caution.
And what that means is you may
visit a login page that doesn't automatically fill in.
What do you do?
So I've got an example today that. I'm going to show you here.
In just a moment. I'm going to use askleo.com. If you're
interested on the article for which this
video is a companion, Ask Leo.com 145981.
I run through the same examples using
Gmail, which in my experience both does and doesn't work.
In other words, I've seen it work.
Well with my password manager.
I've also seen it not work.
But for this example, I'm going to
use Ask Leo and we're going to walk through some of the alternatives you have
when LastPass in this case, doesn't fill it in.
Okay, so here I am at AskLeo.com. I'm not signed in.
I'll go to my account now.
In this case, you'll see that Last pass already is here.
I've got the extension enabled.
It has access to the site as
is described here, and it's actually already filled in some information.
Let's assume for a moment that it did not.
In fact, I'm just going to go ahead and erase what's here to make
it look like LastPass failed to fill it in.
The very first thing you should look
at is this little icon here that.
Is actually a small Gray version of
the Last pass icon, the three dots in a block, and it has the
number three associated with it.
You may have a different number.
That's fine.
What that's telling you is that Last
Pass recognizes this page,
it recognizes this field, and it has three different sets
of login credentials for this site.
What I'll do is I'll click on
it and LastPass will then give me the list of those things that it
knows about. Those credentials associated with this site.
I'll click on the one I want
to use and it fills it in for me.
Great solution.
Number one, if it's not filled in, just click on the icon and see
if LastPass has something for you and
if it will fill in for you.
Now, option number two.
Again, that LastPass icon and the clipboard.
In fact, you may have seen it.
Briefly as I did my mouse thing a moment ago.
Once again, we have nothing in the field.
Simulating LastPass
not having automatically filled this in. I'm going to click on the icon again.
This time, instead of just clicking on.
This, I'm going to click on this drop down over here.
This drop down has more options for you.
It says Copy password, copy username, and copy URL.
We're going to ignore the copy URL for a moment.
What I'm going to do is I'm
going to copy the username
and then right click and paste right into the username field.
Then down here, I'm going to click
on that icon again.
For the record, I'm going to not edit this out.
You'll notice that I'm having trouble clicking.
On this icon, and that's because the
icon is in the same place as
this, literal, Eye con
that would normally
be enabled for you to see your
password as you type it in, rather
than just showing you the Asterisks. Clicking
on the right thing can be a little difficult with LastPass.
Totally get that. But the good news here is that.
We've got this other one up here.
We'll go ahead and click on that again,
even though it's in the username field this time.
Instead of saying Copy
username, I'll copy the password.
Then I'll click down in the password field, right click and paste it in.
Now, I can log in.
I've entered my username and my password, and if I hit login, I will
log in as this user.
So that's option number two.
Option number three. We're going to go ahead and once again
simulate LastPass not having done anything.
This option may work even if LastPass says that there are no available options.
In other words, if this icon is
either not here or if it's here,
but it shows you a zero or no number at all. I'm going to
right click in this field and click on or Hover over LastPass.
Now, in this specific case, this specific
example for Ask Leo.com, there's nothing available here.
If you take a look at the
gmail example, you will find examples here.
That will once again allow you to.
Select which set of credentials you want to use.
And if you click through a little
deeper, it'll give you the fill option
to simply fill in the username and password, or the Copy username and copy
password, as we did using the icon before.
But in this case, this is another
example of LastPass doing the best that it can.
And again, this is true for all.
Of the password managers. They're doing the best that they can.
But they may not necessarily be able to give you all of the options
in all of the sign in pages,
which is why it turns out to be useful and important, in fact, to.
Know about some of these alternatives.
Now, the browser bar icon is very
much like the icon we've run into earlier.
Now I'm going to go ahead and.
Click on the Last Pass icon here up in the browser bar.
And if, by the way, your last pass icon doesn't show,
make sure that in this case I'm using Edge, there's.
The option here to say Pin this.
Or make sure this is available on the toolbar.
Make sure you see
I've got these other extensions installed, but none of them are visible
on the toolbar, but I've ensured that the last pass icon is.
Clicking on the last pass icon gives.
Me some of the options that I have available.
View all Fillable Items These are my
three options, the same set that I got from clicking on the icon in the field.
This time, I can either let it
fill, which would fill the two fields for me.
Or I could drop down here and I could copy username copy password.
And again, since I have multiple credentials.
For this specific sign in page, I.
Can choose which one I might want
to do that. For the pencil icon
by the way, in all of these cases would
allow me to edit the entry for this specific site.
I'm not going to go over that because that's not what we're trying to do here.
If you don't find an icon here.
If right click doesn't give you something
useful on the right click menu, then.
The thing to do is to click.
On this and see if there is something available in the view all fillable items.
You can see that there are a bunch of other options here.
So you may end up coming back here occasionally for other things,
but this is a quick way to see what else is available for this specific site.
So let's say none of this is working.
Let's say that we've got nothing here.
This icon doesn't help us.
Right clicking doesn't help us.
Nothing shows up in the drop down menu. Fine.
Let's take a look at the Vault.
In this case, what I tend to do I'm going to open my Vault here.
You can see I actually have it over here.
I tend to keep it pinned at
all times just because I find myself
going back to the Vault periodically.
It also happens to be a handy page of shortcuts for sites that I want to visit.
But you can see here I have
these three different askleo.com items,
the ones that were shown in those examples before.
But if those examples hadn't worked, I could come back here.
This time, the pencil icon has been
replaced with a wrench icon to mean
exactly the same thing.
It means edit.
What we're going to do is we're going
to edit this thing, not to make a change, but in fact to get access
to the information that LastPass has stored for us.
So I'm going to, first of all, select the username.
I'm typing Control C, although you can right click and hit Copy.
If you want to go back to my account this time, you can see I can paste it in.
I'm going to go ahead and use. CTRL V because I'm a keyboard kind of guy.
Go back to the Vault.
This time I actually have to expose the password in order to make this work.
Now you're not seeing the password.
My video editor will have done her.
Job and protected my Privacy and blocked this out.
But please understand that what I'm looking
at as I record this is the
actual password for this site.
I'm selecting it and I'm again typing
control C to see the password to
copy the password to the clipboard.
I'm going back to my account and
I'm pasting it in.
And now I can log in.
So those are no fewer than four
different ways to not have to remember your password.
In each and every case,
we've either found a different way to get last pass to paste in or enter
the password on our behalf or make the password available so that we can copy
it to the clipboard and paste it into those fields ourselves.
Remember, this is just LastPass as an
example, these same concepts may very well
apply to almost any password manager
Simply because login pages signing pages are very
complex at times and not every password.
Manager is going to be able to
figure out whether or not this is
a page that it should be filling things in on.
Now I also have to talk very briefly about mobile.
Obviously this was a desktop example but.
All of the concepts that I've talked about
here Actually apply to the mobile app as well.
If you have last pass installed on your mobile device Be it an iPhone
or an Android device or tablet of some sort, the biggest difference is that.
You might want to play with long
tap in the password field or basically
firing up the last pass app itself and searching in that app for the
credentials you're looking for
if LastPass can't automatically fill things in for you.
But again, the copy paste example out
of the vault directly definitely works.
I actually do it all the time.
But it is another alternative to making
sure that you don't have to remember these passwords because that way your passwords
can be nice and long and complex and something that you could never possibly.
Remember because your vault is remembering it for you.
So I hope that helps.
The bottom line here is that not filling
in is not an excuse not to use a password manager.
You should be using a password manager.
There are so many different ways to
get the information out of your password manager securely So that you can use it.
There's just no reason not to Because it
does enable all of those really long strong passwords and using a different.
Password on every site without you having
to remember. For updates.
For comments, for related links and more,
and for that example using gmail as well, visit askleo.com/145981
I'm Leo Notenboom this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.