Browser remembers your password, but you don’t? Take it back!

November 5th, 2017. Tagged: bookmarklets, qa

We've all seen something like this:

browser remembers a password

But you have no idea what the password is. How to get the human-readable version of *******?

Method 1: use the browser's developer tools

Provided you have a reasonably recent browser, just open the Developer tools by right-clicking the input field with the password and then select "Inspect Element".

Then find the Console tab (or hit ESC) and type:

$0.value

That's it!

now you know the password

$0 means "active element" so if the above doesn't work it means you've clicked somewhere else and the password field is no longer the active element being inspected. So right-click and inspect it again.

Method 2: a bookmarklet

If you don't want to type every time or your browser (looking at you iOS Safari) doesn't offer an easy web dev console, a bookmarket is to the rescue. Here it is:

javascript:document.querySelectorAll('[type=password]').forEach(f=>f.type='')

Try it: show password

Now install this bookmarklet by right-clicking and bookmarking this link: show password

Note that iOS Safari doesn't like to bookmark bookmarklets, so you need to:
1. bookmark anything else, e.g. this page
2. then go edit the bookmark and paste the code above (the one that starts with javascript:)

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