I wouldn’t recommend to use your browser as password manager. It’s not just a matter of security, but mostly of convenience.

• if you use multiple computers you need to properly sync your password collections on all of them;
• not all login forms are “browser friendly”, sometimes it’s quite impossible to automatically remember your login credentials;
• not all your passwords are related to web sites, sometimes you just need the admin password for your router;
• if working from a public terminal it won’t help having all your password stored on your pc at home;
• …

I’m of course advocating the use of online password managers, and I’m badly biased since Clipperz is soon going to launch exactly such a tool. But even if you are not going to adopt a password manager, it’s always nice to have full control of your passwords and being able to extract them from the browser memory it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer come with a built-in export function for stored passwords. Here is a quick guide to overcome this limitation.

• Firefox
  You could use this script or, much easier, install the Password Exporter, a dedicated Firefox extension by Fligtar. It allows you to export your saved passwords to an XML file.

• Internet Explorer
  The best resources are from Nir Sofer. His Protected Storage PassView displays all the passwords and AutoComplete strings stored in your Window’s system Protected Storage. But since Internet Explorer 7 doesn’t use Protected Storage to save passwords any longer, Nir recently released IE Pass View to extract the same data. Both utilities can export the password set in several formats, including tab-delimited text files and XML files. Thanks to Claus Valca for the hint.

_{(picture from Michigan Engineering)}