Vivaldi forgets passwords always - regardless of the system
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I just reinstalled Windows (7, with the same serial number I used before), copied the browser settings and... no passwords. I'm getting sick of having to enter passwords every fucking time I reinstall OS. Maybe you should change the name of the browser to Regression, instead of Vivaldi because for quite some time I keep reading only about regressions in new versions. The passwords problem is the major regression!
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That's magic. How do you do it? It can't be replicated by anyone else, so your talent it truly unique and deserves to be celebrated the world over.
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Vivaldi's (and most chromium browsers') encryption of saved passwords relies on Windows encryption services which use a hash of the user account identifier code and an OS installation identifier code to encrypt/decrypt stored passwords and install extensions and their data. If you freshly reinstall Windows from DVD's or ISO files, whether with the same product S/N or not, the OS will create brand new identifier codes for itself and for each user account you create, even if a user account is named the same as previously existed. A different OS code is uniquely created whenever a completely new OS installation is performed, and similarly for each user account code whenever a new user account is created. A fresh OS installation will not have any memory of what codes/keys may have existed before, and so it will create new and different codes/keys from scratch.
The result is that When you perform a fresh reinstall of the OS from original media, you blow away any ability to decrypt whatever data had been encrypted this way under the former installation - the codes/keys used for decryption will have been automatically changed upon the fresh installation. The new installation acts like (and is, in an OS installation sense) a totally different system, which is the intended security effect of using such an encryption scheme - it assures that somebody else can't decrypt your passwords or extension data by copying the relevant file(s) to another system or another user account on the same system..
If you had restored/recloned the OS from a previously-made, full-system image backup, this should not have happened since such an approach would have preserved the original installation and user account codes/keys, so the encryption hashing would remain unchanged. There is no regression here, based on what you've written, but instead a failure to understand how password encryption operates under Vivaldi and Windows.
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I should have read this more carefully. User is complaining passwords vanish EVERY TIME he re-installs the OS? How many times a day/week/month does one do this? I do it every time I have to replace my hard drive (and can't clone the old one) or my entire computer. That is, once every three or four years as a rule.
HOWEVER - if a user simply MUST re-install the OS every few days or weeks, then the user should use KeePass to store passwords, ChromePass (or equivalent) to save off passwords, or simply use a password service like LastPass, and give up on the idea of saving passwords in the browser.
To re-install the OS and expect passwords in browser files to survive the change-over is to assume that OS vendors have no security standards.
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(moderated - language) Firefox encrypts its passwords and yet it doesn't care about the system and it doesn't matter how many times I reinstall OS - the passwords are always there and no addons are needed.
And I wouldn't have to reinstall OS a few times a week, if AMD did a better testing of their drivers which tend to crash often when I run World of Tanks. -
… Firefox encrypts its passwords and yet it doesn't care about the system and it doesn't matter how many times I reinstall OS - the passwords are always there and no addons are needed.
And I wouldn't have to reinstall OS a few times a week, if AMD did a better testing of their drivers which tend to crash often when I run World of Tanks.Firefox uses a different encryption mechanism for its passwords than do chromium-based browsers, which is certainly feasible for Mozilla since they also code the underlying Gecko rendering engine used by their browser and can perform password encryption in whatever way they choose. Whether Vivaldi's developers would ever choose to expend the significant effort needed to perform their own unique password encryption/decryption tasks outside of chromium's mechanism (or whether that's even possible) is for others to determine. But at this stage of the game and with all the other things needing Vivaldi developer attention, it's likely to be a long time (if ever) before a different password encryption scheme comes to Vivaldi.
If playing a single game forces you to reinstall an OS several times a week because of 'driver crashes', I'd be taking a very hard look at my system/hardware, the drivers themselves, and/or whether it's worth the bother merely to play that game. One thing for sure, I'd at least be restoring from a full pre-crash system drive-image file instead of doing fresh reinstalls. Beyond that, I'd be exploring whether use of a virtual machine to play the game on that system would have merit in containing the crash damage without trashing the whole OS installation.
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The result is that When you perform a fresh reinstall of the OS from original media, you blow away any ability to decrypt whatever data had been encrypted this way under the former installation - the codes/keys used for decryption will have been automatically changed upon the fresh installation.
Anyway you can have a fresh installation and retain the UUID, just doing an in place upgrade to keep the users documents only.
Althoug not clearly stated by MS, this way all your windows users and pw are retained so moving there the vivaldi profile from the windows.old folder will retain its PW and extensions as well.
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…. you can have a fresh installation and retain the UUID, just doing an in place upgrade to keep the users documents only.
Althoug not clearly stated by MS, this way all your windows users and pw are retained so moving there the vivaldi profile from the windows.old folder will retain its PW and extensions as well.
That would indeed work, provided that the system will still boot prior to making such a repair and provided that the user is able to reinstall any flaky/corrupted drivers before attempting the upgrade-in-place.
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