Reveal the password in a password field on a web page

Mar 31, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: canisbos

If you're ever in the situation where you have forgotten the password for some web site, but it is right there in the password field of the login form -- only in the form of asterisks or bullets -- and you would like to copy it from the password field, if only it were not asterisks...well, you can.

You can convert the password field to a plain text field, which will reveal the password behind the asterisks. To do so, you will need to use your browser's web inspector. The following is the procedure for Safari; the steps are similar in Google Chrome.

You should now be able to see the password in the password field. You can close the web inspector if you wish.

If this seems like a lot of work, an altenative is to install and use a browser extension that will reveal passwords when you do something like move the mouse over them or click inside them. For Safari, one such extension is ShowPass; similar extensions exist for Firefox and Google Chrome.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. I used Safari 5.0.4.]

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