How to Type Your Password Correctly Every Time With Visual Hashing

Passwords are everywhere. No, I don’t hate them at all. What I do find irksome is the task of remembering all of them and the CAPTCHA that sometimes comes on when I mistype one repeatedly. Typing passwords is second nature to most of us these days. But let’s also remember that speed also leads to ‘mishaps’. It’s the same with passwords too – the odds of mistyping one are pretty high. Especially when you are in a hurry to quickly check your account and scoot.

So, let’s solve this with Visual Hashing. Visual Hashing is a cool browser add-on for Firefox and Chrome that detects a password while it is being mistyped and changes the color to indicate that you typed it in incorrectly. Let’s take this with an example after installing the add-on for the respective browsers.

This is how my password field looks after installing the Firefox add-on. Visual Hashing displays four colored boxes in the password field.

The boxes change their color as you type and if you type it in incorrectly. For a mistype, the password field is as displayed below:

As you can see, the colors for the two don’t match. Type in the right password and the boxes (four color hash) will change color and match the first screen.

Of course, you have to remember the color combination across all your password fields as each account is differently colored, but I guess this will become second nature too after using it for a while. I wish this add-on could give me an option to switch off the color hashes for specific accounts. But till it does, I am using it to catch a mistyped password. Those password verification CAPTCHAs are irritating!

You can download Visual Hashing as a Firefox add-on and a Chrome extension.