For a while now, password managers have handled a lot more than just passwords. Especially now with passkeys gaining momentum and lots of organizations like Android, Windows, Apple, and the FIDO Alliance using the phrase credential manager instead of password manager, it’s time to update the site to reflect these changes.
I would say no.
People are still learning about password managers and all that they do and credentials can be called passwords too because passwords are part of credentials.
This would just confuse people and we don’t need it to cause any more hindrance than it already does for some people or the lay persons.
It’s an industry term at this point and PG should not be the one to force a terminology change for small technicalities.
I agree. It’d be important to use the term password manager somewhere on the page as with the term ‘custom ROM’ on the Alternative Distributions page though.
Despite password manager arguably being a misnomer, it’s still going to be what a lot of users search for and it’s important they still arrive at the correct page.
I don’t feel too strongly about this, but I don’t really like this idea, and it kind of goes the opposite direction of the recent proposal to rename Real-Time Communication to Instant Messengers. It seems more clear to use the commonly known terminology, and—maybe more importantly—to match what the services themselves refer to themselves as.
These examples are a gigantic stretch because none of the examples linked are user-facing products like the password managers we recommend.
- Google calls theirs Google Password Manager at https://passwords.google.com/
- Apple calls theirs Passwords
I think a more generic term like “credential” or “secrets” management is more accurate and inclusive (even credential management is a bit overly specific since most password managers also provide features for storing payment/CC info, addresses or ‘identities’, “secure notes” and other forms of secrets that are not specifically credentials.
I do agree with the others that “Password Manager” is the most widely used, widely understood, colloquial way to refer to this class of software. If the name were to be changed, I think care would need to be taken to ensure that people searching for password managers could still discover and recognize the correct section (e.g. “Credential Managers (Password Managers)” or “Secrets and Password Management” or something to that affect).
I don’t really have a strong opinion one way or another. Password managers kind of outgrew their name a long time ago, but the name remains the most common and most recognizable term.
Would a beginner be confused by this change? Most likely.
Great observation! Another thing to worry about is SEO. Even if credential manager and real-time communication are the correct terms, the colloquial vocabulary makes sense to attract low information users.
As much as a lot of people here are IT or security adjacent, we can’t really assume that most readers/lurkers will know this. Even if we take it upon ourselves to normalize these terms, it might end up hurting us in the short-term
I once earlier proposed to change it to identity management and put also aliasing services under it as they also get more and more intergrated. But i supposed this is more a matter of the right time.
Since our target audience are the normies of the world and the site’s mission is to push to become a more privacy and security literate individuals, I’d say it should still say password managers because in my mind, while the vaults I have do have more than just passwords, I still call them password managers in my mind because thats the parlance I have been used to for some time.