As more of us are using online services for personal use, work use and school/education. It is important that we are making sure we are keeping our accounts/data safe and secure. Hackers and criminals are getting more creative in the ways they try and steel our passwords and gain access to sensitive information. Thus, we need to make sure we are keeping one step ahead of them by making it harder for them to gain access to sensitive information.
Microsoft Edge has tools built into the browser that allows you to keep your passwords secure, and help you create new secure passwords you can use for different sites. This article will go through these features and provide you with instructions on how to enable them. These may differ between builds/versions of the Edge browser.
Sign in
To use some of the features in this article, please ensure you have signed into the Edge browser and that it is synchronising. If you have a local profile and want to sign into your account (either work/school or personal account), please launch Edge.
Then, on the top-left of the browser window, you want to click onto your avatar
A menu should appear with your account information & Microsoft rewards points. You want to select Add profile which is found at the bottom of the menu.
It will then load a new instance of the browser on a new profile and begin to ask you to sign in and setup your browsing experience.
Locating these features
The features that are discussed in the article are in the password section in Edge settings. You can get to this setting by copy and pasting, or typing, the following URL: edge://settings/autofill/passwords
You can navigate to these settings by clicking onto your profile avatar located on the top-left of your window.
Then select the “Passwords & autofill”
You will then be taken to the Microsoft password manager which is built into the Microsoft Edge browser. This is where you can view all of your saved passwords under your Microsoft account, access more settings for your passwords and password security check feature.
Password security check (Scan for leaked passwords)
One feature the browser has is the password security check. This feature allows you to view passwords that have been leaked, reused or that are week.
To access this feature, please click onto “Password security check”
As soon as you open the password security check, it will check all of your passwords stored to see if any have been leaked, reused or week. Once it has done this, it will update the table.
For security, you should not use a password more than once for different sites. You should use one password for each site. This way, if one is compromised, the attacker cannot get into other accounts using the same password.
At the top of the table, you will want to click the tab for what table you wish to see.
Each tab will display a different table showing your accounts. You can view your accounts and the options for viewing your passwords, changing your password, editing your password/info or deleting it.
If you are wanting to change your password, please click onto the change option. This will open a new tab onto the website’s page where you can sign into your account and change your password.
If you want to delete the entry because you no longer have the account anymore, please click onto the ellipsis icon (three dots) and select delete.
It is important to keep your password list up to date. So if you no longer have an account, but have stored the username and password, you may as well remove it as it is no longer needed.
Suggest strong passwords
Another way we can keep our accounts secure online is by allowing Microsoft Edge to suggest strong passwords you can use on sites that you are creating accounts on. This generates random characters, numbers, and symbols that you can use as a password.
This setting is called “Suggest strong passwords”
For this, you will need to go back to the Microsoft password manager page and click onto “More settings”
On the settings page, you will see a list of options you can enable or disable depending on your preference. I would suggest enabling the option for the browser to suggest strong passwords.
You can toggle this option on and off. If it is blue/green, and the white dot is to the right, then it means that it is on. By having this option enabled, Edge will offer randomly generated passwords you can use when signing up to sites. It will then save these passwords in Microsoft password manager, so you don’t need to try and remember the password it has generated. This will sync to your other devices you have signed into your account on.
Once this feature has been enabled, you will notice that Edge will automatically generate a password for you to use on a site. You can trigger it to do this by right clicking into the password field and selecting the option to generate a strong password.
You will notice that this will be automatically generated and placed inside the password box. When you click into the password box, you can choose to refresh (generate a new password) or you can leave it alone and go ahead and create a new account on the site.
View and autofill passwords and passkeys
Microsoft password manager allows you to choose whether you want the browser to autofill passwords that it has stored for websites. I recommend enabling this feature on your account that no one else uses. If you have a shared account, do not turn this option on. To enable this feature, please toggle the autofill passwords and passkeys option to on and choose the relevant option you wish to use.
Once you have enabled this option, by default, the fill website password and sign in automatically option will be enabled. When you sign into a website that you have saved a username and password for, Edge will autofill your username and password for you as soon as you click onto the email/username box.
If you are using a shared device with your own individual accounts, I would recommend using the “Prompt for the device sign-in options before viewing or filling website password” option for added security. This will prompt you for your Windows Hello pin before populating the sign in boxes with the relevant information. You can learn more about this here: https://aka.ms/requireauth
Scan passwords for leaks
This option is tied to the password security check option earlier in this article. I recommend having this enabled
Once enabled, the browser will automatically scan your passwords for any leaks that have been reported or detected. If there are any leaks, they will be visible on the leaks table in the password security check feature. It does also provide you a notification if it has detected anything. More information about this feature can be found here: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2356322
Automatically upgrade to passkeys
This setting will prompt you to upgrade to a passkey to use instead of a password, if the site supports passkeys. Passkeys are more secure because of how they work. As security is advancing, more sites are moving away from traditional methods for account security and moving closer to new modern systems such as passkeys.
I hope it was useful. Other articles you may be interested in reading are: