Roboform for Chrome now available in Alpha version

Tom — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:54:06 +0000

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I have come to prefer Chrome as my favorite browser, but there was no Roboform integration, and I just can’t survive without Roboform (a password manager, but also a way to manage all sorts of sensitive information and keep it encrypted). As of April 14, Roboform has a Chrome adapter now too. That means it now works with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, iPhone/IPod Touch, and Android and Chrome (see full list).

I store everything in Roboform even though it costs money, because:

It’s convenient: one click and I’m logged in
It’s encrypted and password protected
All information is available from all compatible browsers and directly from the Roboform interface as well
It’s available offline

Offline support is important to me because I use it to store all kinds of information that I want encrypted, but which doesn’t necessarily pertain to online services. So I like that available even when I’m offline but, say, need my bank info to make a call to my bank.
Until now, Roboform for Chrome has only been available in the online version (which is similar to KeePass and other online password storage solutions). As of a couple of weeks ago, there is now an alpha version of the full Roboform toolbar.
Of course, it comes with all the warnings for alpha products, but I’ve been using it for a week or so and no serious problems. On one website, I used Roboform to fill a form and got a popup saying Roboform had become unresponsive, did I want to stop it? I clicked yes, but in fact nothing bad happened. It correctly filled and submitted the form and Roboform was still available on subsequent pages.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with this!

Getting Roboform Default Logins to Work Right

Tom — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:19:59 +0000

I am an absolute Roboform lover. It’s gotten to the point that my wife and I can’t bear to use a computer without having Roboform on it and now own three licenses between us. My wife really likes the Google Chrome browser, but refuses to use any browser that doesn’t have Roboform integration. If you’re like us and you do most of your banking, pay your bills, lots of shopping and so on, you have dozens of logins. If so, it’s just painful to surf the web without Roboform.

But it does have one annoyance that was driving me nuts. Quite often you’ll have multiple entries for a given domain. For example, I have two gmail address and my wife has one. So if I go to gmail.com (er, actually google.com/mail), Roboform gives me three logins to choose from. Now I want my main account, not my wife’s or my spamcatcher account. Naturally, I set my main account as my default, but every time I would go to Roboform, it would try to sign me into my wife’s account by default. So I can’t just push a button and go, I need to select from the list of three, push a button and go.

Why wasn’t my default choice working?

I finally figured out that Roboform was listing my choices alphabetically and ignores my preference.

It turns out taht there’s a simple setting to fix this. By default, Roboform is set to “use best URL match” and, given several equally good matches, sorts alphabetically regardless of what the default is set to. So you simply turn this setting off and your defaults will work. Changing the setting is simple:

Fire up a browser that has Roboform integrated.
Click the down arrow on the Roboform icon and choose “Options” (see screenshot #1)
Under the General Options tab, uncheck the box that says “Show Matching Passcards with the best URL match on top (screenshot #2).

Roboform Options Panel

Roboform Settings Screen

Why Roboform doesn’t default to this option is a mystery to me, since it will only show you logins with matching domains anyway. I suppose if you had different logins for different parts of a site, like say for “support” and “forums”, you would prefer a URL-based match. That seems like it would be the less-likely scenario and, generally, Roboform seems to be very well thought out in terms of usability, but there it is. That’s how it works out of the box and how to bend it to you will.

So that got rid of the one little nit I had to pick with Roboform.

Raised By Turtles» roboform

Roboform for Chrome now available in Alpha version

Getting Roboform Default Logins to Work Right