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.
- Right-click the password field and select 'Inspect Element' in the context menu. This will open the web inspector and highlight the HTML tag for the password field.
- The highlighted line should contain something like this:
<input type="password" name="something">
(Don't worry if it doesn't look exactly like that. As long as the HTML tag contains the type="password" part, you can proceed.)
- Double-click the word "password" following "type=". This will let you edit the text.
- Replace the word "password" with the word "text", and press Enter. Now the tag should like this:
<input type="text" name="something">
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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