Best Password Managers for Microsoft Edge

Thankfully most password management companies have realized the potential in Microsoft Edge and treat the browser – which is commonly shoved aside – as an equal to the most popular browsers. And with the handy extensions developed by these companies even Edge users could have all their passwords, forms and other credentials readily available with a single click.

Exporting passwords from Microsoft Edge

Even though it was released in 2015 alongside Windows 10, Edge is still falling behind popular web browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari; to make the situation even more ridiculous, Edge is even less popular than its infamous predecessor, Internet Explorer.

This is completely unsurprising when considering the fact that its performance is not on par with the features of convenience that the most popular browsers have by default. As you may have probably guessed by now, aside from bookmarks and favorites Edge doesn’t support the direct exporting of passwords and credentials. The only guaranteed (and safe) way to import the necessary data, therefore, is to turn to password managers and their Microsoft Edge add-ons.

To export passwords without password managers consider using VaultPasswordView – developed by Nirsoft, the same company behind ChromePass – but only after files and folders containing saved passwords have been located on the computer. The latter is extremely important, because the following paths leading to these files have to be provided to VaultPasswordView before it’s used for the first time:

• C:\Users\[User Profile Name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Vault
• C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Vault
• C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\AppData\ Local\Microsoft\Vault

Once the necessary information is provided to the program, VaultPasswordView decrypts the files and all passwords saved to Microsoft Edge are displayed.

Password security in Microsoft Edge

The overall performance of Microsoft Edge’s security is not bad at all, provided that some features are turned off and certain settings are modified before the browser is used for the first time.

Like its troubled predecessor, Internet Explorer, Edge uses local encryption to protect important credentials entered into the vault. Sadly, however, the moment the Windows password is provided on the login screen and Edge is launched, nothing can stop wrongdoers from easily accessing the sensitive data since the browser doesn’t protect its password vault with a master password (as is the case with Firefox).

And unlike its competitors, Edge suffered a major blow in early 2017 when a serious vulnerability was discovered in its coding. If it hadn’t been discovered by security expert Manual Caballero, hackers could have used this vulnerability to relatively easily bypass the browser’s SOP (Same Origin Policy) protection and steal login data from unsuspecting users as they are directed to a malicious URL.

To make things even more frightening, no patch was released to fix this serious issue until the middle of June 2017, which is ridiculously slow, especially from such a corporate giant like Microsoft that considers Windows 10 a masterpiece.

Keeper for Microsoft Edge vs password managers

Any third party password manager is better than Microsoft Edge’s in-built version – which needs to be disabled in order to let these programs work properly – but Keeper definitely stands out from the pack. At first glance Keeper might seem like a typical password manager: it stores numerous logins and allows the saving of multiple passwords to a single account.

The software also safeguards personal data and payment information to which files can be attached, such as a picture of yourself or a photographic copy of a credit card. All of this data can be shared with a trustworthy person, but there’s also an option to create backups of the entire vault in Keeper’s cloud storage.

However, Keeper has one major advantage over its competitors: perfect integration with Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge. Although it can be downloaded as a regular desktop program, Keeper is also available from the Windows Store; in fact, if the latter version is downloaded then it can be signed into using Windows Hello login options.

To make things even better, Keeper has a perfect browser add-on for Microsoft Edge with neat features like auto-fill, one-click sign-in, a search bar, and quick access to the web vault.