One password to rule them ALL ..

Since long time, I was searching for a solution to manage all my passwords. I maintain about 15 different online accounts, and it is a nightmare to remember user names and passwords for all those accounts and I very often end up using same password for multiple accounts. I usually manage to get away with this option since I mostly operate in secure environments (like office or home) .. and my passwords are not that valuable anyway :)

But I was surprised that no solution existed for this and I was even thinking of writing one myself, until I saw PasswordMaker.

This is exactly the kind of add-on I was looking for. It works in a very simple way - When you are about to log in to any web application, just right click on the empty text boxes and click PasswordMaker->Populate this field. It automatically populates both the user name and password. This password is generated by hashing a combination of the domain part of the URL and a master password you give. You can enable it to store the master password either in memory or on disk or you can type it yourself every time you want to populate a password field.

In a sense, it acts like a password store (if you allow it to remember the master password). You never need to remember another password again. But what if you are on a different computer? No problem, if you remember all the profile settings like which algorithm to use, what is the modifier etc., you can use the online version to generate your passwords. Or you can install the add-on on that computer too, if you can replicate the profile settings.

PasswordMaker is definitely a useful tool but it would have been even more useful if there was an easier way to transfer profile settings between computers. But one can overcome that issue with several workarounds ..