On: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

[mcpackieh]

My problem with Firefox's password manager is there doesn't seem to be a way to export/import to/from an encrypted file that I can back up to other places. I can export to an unencrypted text file (and no apparent way to import again), or I can use their sync service (or run my own maybe?), or I can backup the entire firefox profile.

This is what Firefox says when I go to export my logins: "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."

KeePassXC on the other hand gives me a simple encrypted database file that I can copy around to different places for some peace of mind.

[babel_ → mcpackieh]

> "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."

That's effectively what almost all of them say when you export your logins (usually as CSV, JSON, or XML), because they export in plain text, because you don't know what the user needs it for, up to and including manual imputation (better than expect a random user to have to learn how to print out a database, or worse submit that database file to some online service to print out).

Users aren't necessarily highly computer literate, we don't want to prevent people from having security, but even if they were they may still have use cases that do not accept such a database (migrating password manager that don't know your previous one, perhaps), so most of them use (unencrypted) plain text and just accept they'll have to leave it in the user's hands, and warn them it's exposed.

We'd absolutely love there to be safe, portable ways to move our data around such that it remains encrypted while migrating, yes, but that's just not something our current crop of software really enables fully these days, unfortunately.