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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Chrome for years, but I'd love to switch to firefox. The last time I checked, 3 things were preventing me:

1) U2F support for Google. There was a U2F extension that worked for some other sites, but I could not get it to work for Gmail / drive /etc.

2) Support for Hangouts

3) All the random web passwords that are in google's password manager

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3) Firefox will import passwords from Chrome automatically. Options -> Security -> Saved Logins -> Import.

Isn't that a bit scary that Firefox can simply import the passwords from Chrome?

There are single-off tools to dump password databases from all 3 major browsers instantly. Terrifying yes, easy to deal with, not so much.

It's not plaintext, but it looks like any program on the same computer and that knows your password can get the decryption key. https://superuser.com/questions/146742/how-does-google-chrom... Firefox stores its passwords as plaintext by default, but you can set a master password that prevents easy decryption. (You could probably sniff it out of a running instance, or keylog it as you type it at the beginning of a session, but it's enough that Chrome's password import fails.)

Edit: Firefox's is also encrypted I guess, but they say anyone with access to your computer can get them unless you set a master password. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/password-manager-rememb...

I do not see this option (Firefox on Linux). Does this exist only on Windows or Mac?

If you're using hangouts for google voice there's an option to have it use email instead which is incredibly nice.

There was also for a while a CLI hangouts client that I used in tmux, I heard google was shutting down the API though and moved everything away from hangouts since I personally wouldn't be able to stand having a browser open all the time just for chat.

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