I CANNOT delete **all** my stored passwords at once?
I need to clear my personal data out of a computer before I return it to its owner. I am **absolutely** appalled and shocked by the fact that it seems to be impossible to clear out all my stored passwords on this firefox browser installation, unless I simply uninstall firefox -- which is exactly what I am about to do. And now that I am aware of this appalling security flaw, I am sorry to say that I will be uninstalling it from everywhere else I use it too.
How can it possibly be that it is thought to be "OK" that in order to remove stored passwords, the user must remove each individual password separately. In my case, that is 227 passwords!! I can clear all browsing history, all cookies, all site-cache data, etc etc.... but several minutes of searching, both in the settings and more generally online, only has produced a way to remove passwords one at a time?
If i have missed the UI to do this, then I apologize for being so annoyed -- but in that case I must report that the feature is EXTREMELY well hidden.
I just cannot BELIEVE any browser I sign into with firefox sync almost instantly copies 227 passwords of mine onto a machine, and that I cannot remove them without doing several HUNDRED clicks.
What am I failing to understand here?
It would be much appreciated if some future answer to this question could also be sent to [email]@gmail.com. I do not think i will be logging into my firefox account again until I can feel more secure that the act of logging in won't copy hundreds of passwords in a way which I then need to spend hours removing.
I loved this browser, but unless I am mistaken about this problem, I'm afraid I simply can no longer use it.
This particular firefox browser is running on an old old lubuntu 386 laptop. Or rather, it is about to be "was running." Perhaps this is a problem in some old old version of firefox which I am running because I am on such an old machine. It is 84.0.2 (32 bit) running on an old old Acer Aspire One. If that is the case, may I a suggest that you add to your support pages some information on how to remove ALL saved logins in a single act.
Thank you scott petrack
Modified by Andrew
Chosen solution
It will be possible in the next version.
Read this answer in context 👍 0All Replies (3)
Chosen Solution
It will be possible in the next version.
Hey Scott, were you deleting individual logins because there are some you don't want to delete, or do you want to get rid of all of them. Is there any other data that Sync'd over that you also want to get rid of? Or all of it and the new user can set up Firefox from scratch?
Thoughts about those scenarios:
(1) Remove all saved logins but KEEP everything else
Open the current profile folder and remove the files logins.json and key4.db (while Firefox is closed). More info on accessing the profile folder in this article: Profiles - Where Firefox stores your bookmarks, passwords and other user data.
(2) Remove ALL data from this Firefox: logins, bookmarks, history, etc.
Create a new profile (for example, you could call it default2021) and then delete the profile with your personal data. For example: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1306849#answer-1354949
Thank you both for these replies. My situation was that my own laptop was stolen a month ago, and i was temporarily using a very VERY old communal laptop that serves as a backup-spare in the office of a co-op of which I'm a member. I now have a new laptop, and needed to return the machine i borrowed. So i basically wanted to nuke my profile. But since by accident i had sometimes used Firefox without signing in, i wanted to remove ALL passwords.
Writing the question i did was therapeutic enough that I realized by the time i posted it that the safest thing for me to do would be just to nuke the entire .mozilla directory. "In the worst case," i thought to myself, "Firefox will not be able to recover from the blast, I'll have to remove it" -- which was what I was about to do anyway.
I appreciate Firefox very much, but please let me suggest that you do a THOROUGH review of what personal info is left on a machine when a user signs out, clears all history/cache/cookies/profile/etc.... And then add a button to get rid of all of that.
As a feature suggestion, please also consider adding a single-button "Baptise This Browser!!" button - which would -- in a single click-with-confirmation -- remove all traces of any past activity, leaving the browser's internal soul as unsullied as if whatever version it is was just installed. (I note that it's likely that a browser baptised this way is likely NEVER to have been in that state before, since it's very likely that what was originally installed was an earlier version. (So to be clear: if i install Firefox 0.7, and then use it for a year, during which it became Firefox 0.9 via automatic updates, and then i press this button, i will have an installation that cannot be distinguished from a freshly installed Firefox 0.9.
Of course, i realize that this might not actually be possible, for example because the evil OS in which Firefox runs might well retain some history/info which Firefox didn't write and doesn't even know about. But at least you can make it just like the user uninstalled Firefox and then reinstalled the version she has. That would be a great advance over not being able to erase passwords.