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Background:

Story: A colleague of mine told me about 1Password and it seems good to me. I am always trying to use tools which Mac OS X itself gives me, so I've given the Keychain a try. It seems satisfying, but I don't know how to tell Google Chrome to use my specific keychain. I need it to separate saved stuff for work and for private (syncing private to work, but separated from work data).

Stuff:

  • Google Chrome 21.0.1180.57 (Fully updated)
  • Mac OS X Lion (Fully updated)
  • OS X Mountain Lion (Fully updated)

Question: How do I tell to Chrome to use a specific keychain and to save data from/to this keychain?

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5 Answers 5

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This answer is no longer correct: OS X Keychain support is being removed from Chrome 45. See @patte8's answer for more information.

As far as I can tell, Chrome uses the keychain automatically:

Google Chrome can save your usernames and passwords for different websites. The browser can then automatically complete the sign-in fields for you when you next visit these websites.

These passwords are stored in the same system that contains your saved passwords from other browsers. On a Mac, Google Chrome uses the Keychain Access to store your login information.

Source: https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95606

(I'll leave the bit about choosing a specific keychain for Chrome to someone else, I don't know if that can be done)

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  • I'm not seeing this behavior on my Mac/Chrome.
    – Jake Toronto
    Mar 9, 2021 at 23:44
  • @JakeToronto I know – go back and read the first line of the answer: "This answer is no longer correct: OS X Keychain support is being removed from Chrome 45." :)
    – Olly Hodgson
    Mar 10, 2021 at 0:39
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Since v. 45 of chrome passwords are not synced to the OSX keychain anymore, the support has been dropped completely.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=466638

Remove OS X Keychain integration for saved passwords

Starting in OS X 10.9, Apple introduced the iCloud Keychain. This manifests itself as the “Local Items” keychain in Keychain Access. Items in this keychain are only accessible to applications with the keychain-access-groups entitlement [1][2]. This, like other iCloud entitlements, is “available only to apps submitted to the App Store or to the Mac App Store” [3].

The effect of this is that on 10.9 and 10.10, passwords stored in Safari are not accessible to Chrome (but passwords originated in Chrome are still shared to Safari)

Later in the doc:

All the changes hit the 45 release. The plan is to get rid of the complicated Keychain code, thereby improving the robustness of the Chrome Password manager.

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4
  • I'm comparing password management tools. Since I use Chrome, this effectively rules out Keychain, right?
    – amos
    Jan 1, 2017 at 19:05
  • What a load of bullcrap. I never download from the App Store and they all can still use the keychain.
    – LeeR
    Jan 12, 2017 at 20:44
  • 3
    That's frustrating, I frequently use Keychain to look up the passwords I've saved from Chrome.
    – Aaron McMillin
    Feb 9, 2017 at 15:09
  • 5
    ok. I'll just use Safari. that's it... Chrome was nice
    – Alex
    Feb 19, 2017 at 20:01
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I've created small tool to deliver your credentials from Chrome into macOS keychain. Here is a page on github

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  • Welcome to Ask Different! Could you provide a brief overview of how the utility works?
    – JMY1000
    Jan 21, 2018 at 23:17
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    Hi there :) The program interacts with macOS command-line utility called security with option add-internet-password. First of all you have to manually export credetials from chrome into .csv file. There is such feature in Chrome. So, the idea is very simple - the list of credentials from file is being added into system keychain via security
    – Nikita Tarasov
    Jan 23, 2018 at 13:26
  • sure the tool should be used via macos terminal
    – Nikita Tarasov
    Jan 23, 2018 at 13:35
0

You'd better create another user: for work and personal.

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0

Well if you created a new keychain one for work and one for personal that would make your answer of missing all the passwords for chrome, you can have multiple different name keychains but mainly only one can be use per profile.

As for the keychains yes chrome is getting rid of it and using the Gmail account sync feature to remember all your passwords and login, bookmarks etc.

As for the app 1password I switched from roboform (6 years) to 1password (2nd year) and I love 1password I purchased the pro version and this allows me to have work, personal, family, friends with their own passwords and links and each group you can designate a separate password so friends or dog can't see cat passwords or use it.

Hope this helps

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1
  • Your second paragraph is inaccurate. Google's account sync features will remain, they just won't use the iCloud Keychain, instead opting to entirely use their own Google servers.
    – ProLoser
    Sep 29, 2017 at 18:52

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