What if password autofill 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 autofill 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 OK or log in or whatever
In some cases, the password manager might even click that button for you
So 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. 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 vault
Is this or is this not a login? Should I fill it in
If I should fill it in, you know, 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 in to 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
askleo.com slash 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 askleo
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 LastPass 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 LastPass icon that's laid off 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 LastPass 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 dropdown over here
This dropdown 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
That's because the icon is in the same place as this little I icon
that would normally be enabled for you to see your password as you type it in
rather than just showing you the asterisk. Clicking on the right thing can be a little difficult with LastPass
Totally get that. 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. If I hit log in, I will log in as this user
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 the bar sign 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 askleo.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
If you click through a little deeper, we'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
Again, this is true for all of the password managers, but 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
I'm going to go ahead and click on the LastPass icon here up in the browser bar
If by the way, your LastPass 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 a visible on the toolbar
Make sure, you see I've got the other extensions installed, none of them are visible on the toolbar
but I've ensured that the LastPass icon is. Clicking on the LastPass icon gives me some of the options that I have available
View all fillable items. These are my three options. The thing 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
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'll 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 lastleo.com items
The ones that were shown in those examples before. But if those examples haven'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 Control-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 LastPass 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, sign-in 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 LastPass installed on your mobile device, be it an iPhone or 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 LastPass 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's 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 slash 145981. I'm Leo Notenboom. This is askleo.com
Thanks for watching