If you are not using a dedicated password manager like Roboform or the like to take care of your passwords, then you would either have to remember the passwords to all the sites you log into, or let your browser save your passwords. Of course, you wouldn’t want the browser to save your passwords in your workplace for obvious reasons. At home, it may seem safe to do so and it might be too.

But then again, though you might be the only person who uses your home computer all the time or at least most of the time, there may be times when someone else happens to use it too. Like for instance, one of your friends or your guest might want to browse the web for a while. Your immediate thoughts are, what if they want to view one of the sites for which you have saved your password. Your browser would automatically log them in with your username and password. Worse still, anybody can just go to Tools>Options>Security and click on ‘Show Passwords’ and all your usernames and passwords are theirs for the taking. You just don’t want that to happen, do you?

Well, if you use Firefox, then you have a neat little solution built into it. Firefox has a feature called the ‘Master Password’ that’s just right for situations like the above. But not many people are aware of it or use it.

If you go to Tools>Options>Security, you would find that right below the ‘Remember passwords for sites’ checkbox which is enabled by default, there is another checkbox called ‘Use a master password‘ which, by default, is not enabled. If you enable this option, you will be prompted to set a master password. You can set a unique password here. Once you set the master password, whenever you visit a page (since you last launched Firefox) for which you’ve asked Firefox to remember the password, you’ll have to enter your master password first before Firefox fills up the password automatically. And without the master password, no one can use the ‘Show Passwords’ button to view the stored passwords. So, you can safely let your guest use your computer.