Coming soon to Google Chrome: password sync

Slowly but surely, Google has been beefing up Chrome sync abilities. Bookmarks, preferences, themes, typed URLs, and autofill settings can all march in unison across your Chrome installs on all your computers. There are still two notable absences: extensions and passwords.

Make that one: password sync has just landed in the Chromium source code.

Like other sync additions, it'll be a short trip from Chromium to the Chrome Dev Channel -- beta and stable users will have a longer wait. It's also currently hidden behind the --enable-sync-passwords switch.

This is obviously a very useful addition, but I think it's one which underscores the need for Google to add a master password option to Chrome. If I'm going to take the jump and sync all my passwords to their cloud, I'd like to be able to lock the front door to my browser.

At least with LastPass I'm able to do that -- if someone stole my laptop, they'd still need the master password for LP to access my vault. If I started syncing them using Chrome, right now there's no built-in mechanism that would prevent someone from simply launching my browser and signing in to all the password protected sites I use.

Tags: browser, chrome, chromium, google, password, sync, web