Included in the latest experimental build of Chrome is a nice little surprise from Google, a feature that will compete with LastPass and 1Password. We are talking about a password generator of course and a pretty good one at that.
How you trigger this new built-in password generator is by first downloading and installing the latest version of Canary, Google’s experimental version of Chrome. Once you have Canary you will need to enable a couple of flags, please do so at your own risk. You can do so by copying and pasting both of these following lines into your address bar separately and enabling them.
chrome://flags/#enable-password-generation, chrome://flags/#enable-save-password-bubble
Once you do all of that, you can use the password generator by attempting to sign-up on a website. When you inevitably come to the point where you are prompted to create a password you will get a shiny new popup that will ask if you want Chrome to generate a password for you. Not only will you get a strong password generated for you if you decide to move forward, Chrome will also automatically add said password to your Google saved passwords.
There have been some very successful third-party Chrome apps that generate very strong passwords for users as well as save them to a password list. Services like we mentioned above, LastPass and 1 Password, are very powerful and popular password generators that have dominated the space for a long time. Its going to be interesting to see if Google implementing their own good password generator right into Chrome will end up being the death of these third-party services. But at the moment its obviously very hard to tell, its a brand new feature plus it is only in the experimental build of Chrome which means there is a chance that it may never come to fruition in a stable build.
This new built-in password generator is a powerful tool and is sure to make other password generators start to sweat a little bit. And while this is a very cool feature that all you Chrome fans will probably want to try out immediately, we strongly urge you to be careful messing around with flags and experimental features. It can be easy to mess things up if you aren’t exactly sure what you are doing.