Firefox for Android: password selection process improvements

The most recent Nightly version of Firefox for Android features an improved password selection process that should make life a lot easier for users who use the built-in password manager.

I have a great password selection workflow on the desktop using KeePass, the password manager's global login shortcut and copy&paste, but the same cannot be said when I'm using my Android phone.

While I don't log in to sites often there, I sometimes have to do that and it was always a burden to get the passwords from the computer to the mobile device.

I enter them manually most of the time which is not very comfortable but not that much of an issue as I rarely need to sign in on the device.

The most recent version of Firefox for Android improves the selection process significantly, at least for users who make use of the built-in password manager of the mobile browser.

A tap on the site's favicon displays a new option to copy the password from a specific account so that you can copy passwords with just two taps on the device screen.

This works only if you are using the Firefox password manager to save passwords and best if you have multiple accounts saved for a site.

The reason why that is more useful then is because Firefox supports auto-fill but will fill out information for one account only. If you want to switch, you simply copy the password to the phone's clipboard to paste it into the field on the site.

This can be useful as well if you need to enter the password somewhere else, say your Google password in an application that requires that you enter account credentials.

A click on edit site settings in the same dialog displays whether passwords are stored for the site currently in the browser.

Firefox Nightly is the only version of Firefox that ships with a password management interface currently. You open it by loading about:passwords in the browser or with a click on Menu > Settings > Privacy > Manage logins.

The target version for the implementation is Firefox 41 which means that it will take several months at the very least before the improvements land in the stable version of the browser for Android.

Additional information about the implementation are available on Bugzilla.