About Password Manager

[Tianyi Song]

Hi, 

We are upgrading chromium from 114 to 126. It seems now on chrome if press password manager, it will just go to setting's password manager. 

May I know if the old feature saving password on local device is still available?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Tianyi

[Vasilii Sukhanov]

Hi Tianyi,

1. What platform do you mean?
2. Could you attach the screenshot of what you see after going to the settings?

Assuming you are talking about Android, yes, we still support local passwords. You can switch your account from the Google one to the "local" one in the top right corner.

Regards,

Vasilii

[Tianyi Song]

Hi Vasilii,

1. Yes I mean Android Platform.

2. Attached screenshot. 

To be more specific, we hope to get more information about the password manager for non-login users on Android Chromium. 

From the code we see we were using ProfilePasswordManager in chromium 114, and users who don't login Google account will save the passwords locally in the app. 

Then in chromium 126 we found there is a migration from ProfilePasswordManager to AccountPasswordManager for users that login Google account. When I tested in Chrome it will jump to the GMS password manager as attached screenshot. And non-login users can only still use ProfilePasswordManager (from my understanding). We want to know is there any plan to deprecate ProfilePasswordManager in the future (like people will only be able to save password if they login)? Since in that case we need to do some migration.

Thank you!

Best Regards,

Tianyi

[Vasilii Sukhanov]

Hi Tianyi,

In Chrome M124 the passwords were moved to be stored only inside Google Play service. They can be either synced to the Google account or local only based on the Chrome preferences as before. Thus, we support local passwords and will keep that support forever. The fact that they are physically stored in Play Services and not in the Chrome folder should be irrelevant for the password manager users.

In your screenshot I see that those passwords are local. Note the striked-out cloud icon in the top right corner.

Regards,

Vasilii

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[Tianyi Song]

Hi Vasilii,

Sorry that I think my previous screenshot was kind of misleading. That was actually not the local passwords that I wanted to ask about.

I attached a new screenshot where we saw the saved local passwords in chromium 114. It was just in the app - settings - password manager. 

When I updated chromium 114 to chromium 126, these passwords disappeared and were not migrated to Play Service.  But it worked after I changed some flags in the code (to make it use the old backend for profile password manager). 

We hope to know for this kind of local passwords, will it still be supported in the future?

Thank you!

Best Regards,

Tianyi

[Vasilii Sukhanov]

Hi Tianyi,

All local passwords are supposed to be migrated in the background from Chrome profile to Play Service. No password loss is expected.

I don't recommend playing with flags as it really could bring you to a bad state. I recommend creating a new bug at crbug.com. The key information needed there is chrome://histograms/PasswordManager page collected a minute after start-up.

Regards,

Vasilii

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/8c302c57-47a3-43c5-904a-d2b63bb865b9n%40chromium.org.

[Tianyi Song]

Hi Vasilii,

We are migrating to chromium 138 for Android platform now, but it always shows "Password Manager stopped working on this device", and ask me to update Google Play Services, while it is already updated.

When I checked the code, I noticed this part
PasswordManagerHelper.showPasswordSettings ->

PasswordManagerHelper.showPwmUnavailableOrDownloadCsvDialog ->

checks PasswordManagerAndroidUtil::isPasswordManagerAvailable ->

checks PasswordManagerBackendSupportHelper::isBackendPresent -> always return false

which means password manager is always not available and it will not build the credential manager.

How can we make it work now? Is chromium still supporting password manager or only Google Chrome will support it?

Besides we noticed login database deprecation in the code, which mentioned it  is planned to be removed in Nov 2024. However I can still see the related classes in chromium 138, then in this case can we still access login database in chromium 138? I tried to enable use_login_database_as_backend but it did not work. We need to migrate our current app which is still using login database to chromium 138, do you have any suggestion to achieve that?

Looking forward to your reply. 

Best Regards,

Tianyi

[Vasilii Sukhanov]

Hi Tianyi,

The code for LoginDatabase was finally removed from Chromium on Android. Thus, Chromium now uses the password manager that the user configured on Android.

If you want to keep LoginDatabase usage, you can resurrect its code and the `use_login_database_as_backend` flag in your checkout.

Regards,

Vasilii

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-dev/a68b3901-b1fb-4e34-b8c7-e294462645c3n%40chromium.org.