Google Chrome has long offered its own autofill system for your addresses, credit cards, passwords, and more. The company is slowly reworking this system into its full-fledged Google Password Manager, competing with othergreat password managerslike 1Password and Bitwarden. Chrome’s internal autofill system sometimes makes it difficult to use external password managers, though. It looks like an upcoming tweak to the browser could fix this.
Chrome 119 is working on a new settings entry called “Autofill Options.” It’s currently still hidden behind thechrome://flags/#enable-autofill-virtual-view-structureflag. When it’s enabled, you can choose betweenDefaultandUse other providers. The accompanying description makes clear that the second option will allow you to use the password manager and autofill options you’ve turned on in your Android system settings. Meanwhile, the default setting will give you autofill suggestions from Google Password Manager and Chrome Autofill, with the latter providing an option to automatically fill out addresses. This was spotted by Chrome sleuth@Leopeva64 on X(formerly Twitter).
We tested the new behavior on both Chrome 119 stable and Chrome 121 Canary with 1Password and didn’t notice a difference, though. Like before, Chrome and 1Password both show their own autofill suggestions on supported websites, with Chrome’s suggestions showing up in a bar above the keyboard while 1Password’s credentials are displayed in a bar right beneath that. 1Password’s stored address data doesn’t show up at all for us on the websites we’ve tested it on. It’s likely that the new option is very much still a work in progress and subject to change.
The reasoning behind this change likely has to do with how poorly Chrome works with some third-party password managers. While Google Password Manager usually shows its suggestions for the correct websites without problems, third-party password managers often have trouble recognizing login pages and offering saved credentials in Chrome, forcing you to copy and paste your login information manually. This has security implications, as you won’t benefit from password managers’ built-in phishing protection, with them naturally not offering autofill on impostor URLs (think googla.com rather than google.com). Many password managers also allow you to store your address and credit card information, though these often don’t show up as autofill suggestions on mobile Chrome. It’s possible that Google Chrome’s own autofill system is interfering, so an option to prefer external password managers might be helpful.
It’s also possible that Google is tweaking this behavior due to the advent of passkeys, which allow you to log in without even needing a password. Websites and password managers need to play together nicely to enable this. However, Android iscurrently rolling out a more convenient way to log in with passkeys, so passkeys might be unrelated to this new tweak.
