I create all sorts of passwords rather often, be it for me or for my clients. Until today, I always sort of let my hands use the free-fall feature and generated some random characters just by dropping them onto the keyboard. Then I added upper/lower case character and a symbol here and there. I tried to use random password generators before but the above procedure was always faster than locating and executing a special-purpose application. Well, today it occurred to me that a bookmarklet would be a much better solution. The browser is always running and having the bookmarklet in the bookmark toolbar makes using it a single-click job.
So, you know the drill. Drag this onto your bookmark toolbar:
It uses code from str_shuffle() (project php.js) – thanks guys!
You can edit the javascript code and change the set of characters that are used in the password (str). You can also change the password length there (passLength).
I did search the web for an existing solution before writing my own. I found quite a few bookmarklets that generate a unique password based on your master password and the place that you want to use the password for. It wasn’t my case. I needed passwords for new ftp or mysql users, this kind of stuff.
To be honest, I haven’t tested it in anything else than Firefox, the only true browser ;-)
Cool! I’m really starting to enjoy bookmarklets.
And Firefox isn’t the only browser. There’s also Chrome. ;-) And Safari, for our iOS friends…
Works in Chrome, Opera, and Safari (all on Windows). Works in IE7 if you allow the “scripted window”.