Confused about Apple Keychain

Website passwords are typically stored within the browser preferences. For instance, Safari => Preferences => Passwords. You can click on each website and view its password there. Firefox and Chrome have similar repositories.

It is probably best to not make changes inside the Keychain Access application unless you are familiar with the landscape there and understood how the changes will be applied.

Applications like 1Password try to make all this easier for the user to manage. However you need to be attentive to be sure to update such a program before updating your operating system, as it might be disabled if it is an older version when you upgrade.

I don't use 1Password so I can't comment on how it works.

The macOS keychain is a general-purpose encrypted database. It does contain your internet passwords, but also a whole lot of other stuff. Everything in your screenshot falls into that category of "other stuff". Normally, you don't need to use Keychain Access. You can use it to create your own passwords and secure notes, but probably few people do that. Any app that stores data in the keychain should probably provide some method to manage that data. If the user goes into that app-specific data and starts making changes, lots of things are likely to break. In some rare cases, when things are already broken, careful editing in Keychain Access can fix them.

Safari, for example, provides its own interface to passwords. You can access them in Keychain Access as "Web form password". Some lower-level passwords are categorized as "Internet password". WiFi passwords are "Airport Network password". Passwords that you create in Keychain Access manually are "application password". Any other data that random apps might save are also under "application password".

If all that 1Password is doing is saving internet passwords, then it might have a simpler user interface.

Timothy Arends1 wrote:

steve626 wrote:

Website passwords are typically stored within the browser preferences.

Thanks. The list in Safari prefs is much more intuitively formatted. However, this raises a new question: If Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Dissenter, etc. all store their own passwords separately, then where does Apple Keychain come in?

I thought the purpose of Keychain was that you would only need to record your password once, and the system would take care of it from then on. Do these browsers all communicate with Keychain, so that if I update a password in Safari, the change is then reflected in Firefox, Chrome, Dissenter, Brave, etc? Or is that asking too much?

I can see, within the separate browsers' preferences, the passwords saved under each of those browsers. However the browsers do not share between one another, Firefox passwords are handled by Firefox, Safari passwords are handled by Safari, etc. they do not cross-share. I also do not see those browser passwords in Keychain Access listings. So all I can say is that it appears that Keychain Access does not handle all the different browser saved passwords in some centralized manner.

This is where a program like 1Password may offer a real convenience, as I think it centralizes it all. (I don't use 1Password so I'm not 100% certain about that.)