LastPass Portable for Chrome

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on October 17, 2011

LastPass is a free password manager and automated form filler in the guise of a browser add-on. It lets you create one strong (and memorable) master password that you use to securely store and access passwords and log-on data for other sites and services such as Facebook or Google accounts. It's been around a while in several forms, including freeware and premium versions, some of which we've reviewed previously. We recently tried LastPass Portable for Chrome. It's an add-on optimized for the portable version of Google Chrome, though it works just as well in the browser's installed version, as we learned.

We tried LastPass Portable in both installed and portable versions of Chrome, but we focused on the portable version. The tool stresses the importance of remembering your master password, including creating reminders. The process of installing and setting up LastPass was the same in both, and it involves agreeing to send your encrypted data to LastPass, though we only had to create an account once. When we installed LastPass Portable in other versions of Chrome, we merely had to log on to the LastPass site to access out existing account. We could edit our account settings on a tabbed form with entries labeled Security, Equivalent Domains, Never URLs, YubiKeys, Mobile Devices, and more. On the Trusted Computers tab, we could enter the addresses of PCs that don't require multifactor authentication; under URL Rules we could configure multiple log-ins for particular domains. The Security tab let us tailor a custom profile, and the Never URLs tab let us exclude any site under a variety of conditions, such as Never Add Site or Never Generate Password.

We found LastPass Portable to be essentially the same program as the regular version, though we did test its portability by downloading the latest portable Chrome release, installing Last Pass Portable for Chrome, and running it from a variety of locations. This free tool brings improved form filling and password management to Chrome users on the go, too.