Installing Edge and LastPass – Ask Leo! Live

Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you’re having a good Saturday afternoon or whatever time of day it happens to be for you. Things are unusually sunny here in wonderful Woodinville, Washington. Today’s live broadcast, what I want to do is a couple of different things. I’m going to install the latest version of Chromium-based Edge on my Windows 10 Home machine. And then I’m going to install LastPass and run through a couple of not just the steps to install it, but also a couple of the examples of using it, how you use it, what kinds of things you might want to do with it.

Let’s have a look at our screen. Here is our Windows 10 Home machine. This week, I think I’m going to leave myself in the corner to see if that makes any difference. The – this may look a little familiar if you were at any of the previous live webinars, this is the Windows 10 Home machine that I did a Reset this P.C. on, and you might remember that in the last webinar I actually installed a Microsoft Edge from scratch. Well, since that time, I actually ran a Reset this P.C. on this machine again.

It’s, I for whatever reason, maybe it’s because of what I do, but I fall in love with it. It’s just a very quick and easy way to reset my machine back to being something closer to what you experience as opposed to the machine that I’ve, you know, demonstrated things on or tweak things on or whatever changes I might have made. So, you know, any of the customizations that I made in the last webinar, they’re all gone. This is back to and out of the box Windows 10 Home experience.

So what I’ll do is fire up Edge. This is the existing version of Edge. And I’m going to go ahead and use Bing to search for Edge., which is kind of funny, right? Using Edge to search for Edge. I’ve made this this comment before when I last did the Edge download and install. And that is that Edge was often referred to as the browser you ran once to download another browser. That’s still true in this case if you’ve got the old version of Edge, which you can identify by the old icon down here at the bottom of the screen, the new icon is what is the new Chromium-based Edge.

I keep referring to it as Chromium-based. That is because it uses the same rendering engine, the same software that’s at the core of Google Chrome. It’s also at the core of Opera, I think, it’s at the core of the Brave browser and a couple of others. These are all browsers that use that same fundamental rendering engine. When I say “rendering engine”, I mean the software that turns the HTML, the instructions for what should be painted on the screen, into the actual information you see on the screen. Microsoft made the choice to essentially dump the original version of Edge and replace it with this Chromium-based version.

I think that’s a wonderful, wonderful move. And I fully expect that at some point this step that we’re taking right now will no longer be necessary. At some point in the near future, perhaps even with the very next release, feature release of Windows 10. We will see the new version of Chrome be the default version, the preinstalled version of Chrome. I’m sorry, of Edge. You can see I’ve got the two already conflated in my mind. If they actually, as we’ll see in a moment, they are so similar in so many different ways that all of us who have been running Chrome as our favorite/best/most compatible browser should all feel very comfortable running Microsoft Edge.

The Chromium version, at any rate. So while it took over the full screen, it actually fired itself up and installed itself. These are the two icons you want to remember, if you will. The one on the left is the old Edge icon. If you have that on your Taskbar or in your start menu, then you have the old version of Edge, the one on the right, the I don’t even know how not even know how to describe it, the swoopier version of the icon is for the new Chromium-based version of Edge.. If you have that on your Taskbar, if you have that in your start menu then you already have the latest version of Edge, so we’ll go ahead and get started.

We can do some customization, which I will get to shortly. Yes. Welcome, welcome, all that kind of stuff. The first change that I’m going to make is the same change that I made to the last time I ran through this installation. And that is down here on Settings. On startup, I want it to open this page. All right. I want it to open askleo.com as my startup page, The new tab page looks like this, and unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, there’s really not a lot we can do other than choose from these previous or predefined layouts.

There’s nothing, I don’t think I can set it to, no, there’s no way to set this to be a specific page, which I find unfortunate. My preference is that the new tab page act the same way as the Home button or as my first page when I fire up the browser. So I generally will leave it on focused just so that we don’t have all that other stuff distracting us from whatever it is we’re doing. Certainly in these demonstrations, I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that the MSN news page is the first thing that comes up because who knows what’s going on at the time I’m doing one of these demonstrations; who knows if that’s something we want to preserve; who knows if that’s something even appropriate to include. So I want this, this to be my new tab page.

And then the other thing that I want and I need to see if I can find that here real quick is I want there to be a Home button. So if I click on, or if I search for Home- show Home button and I have it set to askleo.com. Now, of course, you may choose a different Home page. That’s fine. Do whatever makes sense for you. But in my case, for the demonstrations that I do, for the kinds of things that I want to be able to do with this, then I want the Home page to be there, to be at, to be basically myself. Ask Leo!.

Now, now that we have this new version of Edge installed that I’m going to do two other things, you’re going to get rid of the icon for the old one and get rid of the icon for the new one, because those of you who’ve been with me for any period of time know that I like a clean desktop. I will find things in the start menu if I need them there.

Now, what I want to do is we’re going to install LastPass (just searching for it). LastPass.com is a fine place to go if you just want to go there directly. We will get LastPass free. I don’t need to create an account; I already have an account, so all I really need to do is download it.

See, I’ll go ahead and log in first. And please don’t think poorly of me. This password is intentionally short because I don’t often, don’t have the ability to copy paste into the machines that I’m demonstrating on. That, however, is protected because it wants two-factor authentication; I have two-factor authentication enabled on this account. So if you’ve never seen two-factor authentication in action, this is it. Let me give this machine a name real quick.

And what I’m doing now is looking at my phone. My phone is actually running the Authy app and it is now displaying for me the code that I need to enter. And there we are. So the whole process of using two-factor authentication, like I said, it is a way for the application from the service, in this case, LastPass to confirm or ensure that I am in possession of that second factor. It has dawned on me, I’ve got, I’ve got the ability to show this to you real quick. Let me throw this up on the web cam. So this is what I was looking at on my phone. That number changes every 30 seconds. You can see that there’s a little countdown timer so you can decide if you can type fast enough or not. That is the two-factor authentication app on my phone. It’s only on my phone or on another authorized device. What that boils down to is, as I said, it proves to LastPass that I am in possession of my second factor. So it’s something, you know, your password and something you have your second factor. In my case, my phone.

By doing that, you ultimately really secure and further lock down your important accounts. And for many people, there’s almost nothing more important than LastPass when it comes to securing your account, your collection of accounts and account credentials, as you can see here. I have two different accounts in this particular copy of LastPass ( I’m going to do it this way). This, as you can see, is a log in account for askleo.com. So this is a user account. It’s not the official account that I use. It’s actually demonstration account. That’s more along the lines of a typical user. And then I also have my Hotmail account, mylogin.live.com, which is essentially my Microsoft account for this machine.

What I’m going to do now is go to – so this is LastPass as it sits here. And we’ve got my LastPass vault visible in the in the browser. I tend to prefer to have it be an extension that’s actually downloaded in the browser itself.

So what I’ll do now is look for LastPass extension. On the download LastPass account, LastPass for Microsoft Edge. This is the correct icon. There are several different approaches. You can download LastPass for whatever browser you happen to prefer. I’m going to go ahead and hit download for Edge and you can see now that it is actually in the Microsoft Store. It’s actually part of the Microsoft store it’s actually adding the Microsoft or the LastPass extension to Chrome. It’s checking. And hopefully very soon it will say – has been added.

Now you can see that this icon has appeared. This icon is currently black. Which means I’m not logged in. Even though I was logged into the LastPass web site, that’s separate from being logged in to your LastPass account using a browser extension or using a standalone application. The browser extension lets you do something really important. The browser extension actually allows you to use your LastPass vault. All of the information in it, in your accounts, your secure notes, your whatevers, even if you’re not connected to the Internet or even if the LastPass servers if you can’t get to LastPass.com for some reason. One of the common concerns I hear from people is what if LastPass goes away? Well, if you’ve got the browser extension installed, if you’ve got the database down on your machine, which is what the browser extension will do, then LastPass.com doesn’t have to exist for you to continue to successfully use LastPass.

So I’m going to go ahead and log in again. It should ask me for the Google Authenticator again. This again is the, again, we we are now logging into the extension. The software running on my P.C. rather than logging into the web site, I’m firing up that same authentication code that I was, I’m sorry, the same app. I happen to use Authy because it saves me multiple different applications across multiple machines, but I’m now currently in fact, I’ll show you, there’s the number, the the difference.

So I can show you that number because in a few seconds that number is gone, it’s changed. And the way that two-factor authentication works, in this case, here’s the new number. The way that two-factor authentication works in these cases is there’s actually no way to predict what the new number will be. So even though I showed you one number heck, I showed you two numbers in sequence. There’s no way for you to guarantee to to predict what the third number or any other number will be. It’s all based on public key cryptography, which is highly secure and highly vetted. And I strongly, strongly recommend that for any application or any log in that you have that is at all sensitive, especially your LastPass account.

You should be enabling two-factor authentication. So now you can see that the little icon here for LastPass is in fact, red. That means you successfully logged in and there’s a dropdown menu of things you can do. I’m going to go ahead and close most of these. I’m going to go ahead and take this one back home to Ask Leo! and see this already – I’m going to log out because I want to show you what how using how you can use LastPass to log in. So, as you can see, even if I just go to this page again, completely refreshing the page from scratch, LastPass has noticed that it’s on this site. So let’s go and have had and have a look at the vault. I really like to pin the vault. That’s just me because it’s a very handy for me, it’s a table, it’s a shortcut, it’s a list of bookmarks. These are sites that I go to all the time that I have to log into. So having the vault off to the left here makes it very easy for me to just click on one of these and go to them.

So you can see here that for askleo.com and I’m gonna go ahead and edit it, which will show you the information that it has stored about this particular entry. This is the URL that it’s looking for. So whenever I visit, askleo.com/myaccount, LastPass knows that this entry applies. It’s actually smarter than that. In my experience, even if I’m on a page other than my account; in other words, if I’m just somewhere in askleo.com, LastPass will still know that this is the correct entry to be using. it can get a little confused sometimes and some of the URLs that it saves when you log in and I’ll show you that in a moment can be a little confusing. But this is what it fundamentally uses to determine whether or not it should act on the log in that you’re looking at.

The name is the name you give to the site so I can call this askleo.com. For example, purposes. Whatever. I mean, it’s this is a name that you choose. It defaults to the name of the site. The username is what I was talking about. That’s the ID, the user name, the email address, the whatever it is, that identifies you specifically as the user for this account. And then of course, the site password is the password you have associated with that account. You can see here that I’ve got it completely bulleted out. That’s the default display for LastPass when it shows you things. If you click on the little eyeball, which I’m not going to do, that would then display for you in plain text the password you have on that account. You can then use that. You can copy paste it.

You can do whatever you want with it. But it’s another way to feel confident that you have access to the passwords, especially when they’re long and complex like they should be. These are not passwords that are designed for you to remember. If you’re using a password generator to create a password and it’s nice and long like mine are typically 20 characters long. The only way you would ever remember what that password is is to come back into the password vault that’s remembering it for you and have a look.

So it’s associated this user name and this password with this URL. That’s what a password vault is in it at its heart. Let’s see. I did make a change. I changed the name. So you can see that is just changed the name here that’s been displayed in the vault. So when I go to a page like askleo.com/myaccount LastPass matches and it says, oh, there’s a username field on this page, I’ll fill that in. There’s a password field on this page. I’ll fill that in. So all that really leaves left for you to do is click log in and you’re logged in. It’s very straightforward. It’s very simple. Now, I do want to show you one specific occasional gotcha that I want to be clear of that you make an intentional decision and it’s this “remember me” checkbox. When you originally create a LastPass entry, it will actually remember the state of checkboxes like Remember Me. That will become part of the information that is saved when LastPass creates its own entry for your site. And I don’t think (it’s not listed here) occasionally, you will actually see the item on the edit password page, but in this case it isn’t, which means it’s left to whatever the default is.

But on many sites, if you had “remember me” checked when you created the entry in LastPass, then every time that entry is used, regardless of where you are, it’ll be filled in for you. That’s why for most cases, I will take a little extra time and make sure that any other settings associated with the log in are set the way I want them to be, which usually means no “remember me” because if I happened to use my LastPass vault on a machine that isn’t mine, I don’t want it remembering me by default and I don’t want to have to remember to uncheck it. I’d rather have to remember to check it on machines that I do want it to remember, where I do want my log in state to be remembered. Hopefully that all made sense. That was an example of using LastPass with an existing account.

Let’s do something different, shall we? Let’s show an example of LastPass saving your account for you.

OK, what I’m going to do this time is log in to askleo.com with an account that has not been added to LastPass yet. So in this case, the username is Leo and this is my official account and I’m actually copy pasting the password from LastPass in a different window. And I do again want it to remember me. I’ll hit log in. Now, this time, LastPass should recognize that we have logged in to a different account. Now let’s be clear about something about what’s on our screen right now and what you’re looking at are two drop-down safe password menus.

One of them is from Microsoft Edge. In other words, the browser is offering to save the password for me. I advise against this. I typically do not want the browser to save passwords for me. And in fact, it’s an option that I will typically turn off in the web browsers because I don’t want them to ever even offer to. I don’t want them to offer to. I don’t want them to save. I don’t want them to bug me. So I’m going to say “never” here for this. That didn’t change any fundamental setting an Edge, but it is at least not going to remember this one. Here, however, we have the pop up from LastPass and it is now saying, hey, I noticed you logged into this site with credentials that I don’t recognize. Shall I save them for you? The answer to that, of course, would be yes, please.

And you can see that it is now all set. You could see that this is a completely different account for two reasons. One is as an administrator on the site, I’ve got a bar across the top here. Let me go back to full screen for you. I’ve got this bar across the top here. And of course, I’ve got you know, I’m a member of absolutely everything on my own site. So that’s the big difference. But the other difference you’ll see now is if we go back to the LastPass vault, there’s a new entry. And that new entry is the know the username Leo at askleo.com this URL. This is what I’m calling it. I’m going to go ahead and say master as my master admin account. And then, of course, the same thing with password and we’ll hit save. That’s how you end up filling your LastPass vault.

You basically install it and then you go about your day. You log in to the services you log into. And then LastPass, when it sees you’re logging into something that it hasn’t saved for you, offers to save it. It’s actually really that simple. So the next question that most people have is, Well great, so it saved my password. What if I want to change my password?”

Well, what I’m going to do is logout, again, of this account, because I don’t want to do this to my master account. I’m going to log in now you can see that since there are two possible accounts for this site, the example log in that we’re looking at right now, and my master admin log that we just created. If you look very carefully, you can see that the little LastPass icon at the end of the password in the username field has a number two next to it. That means that if you click on it, you’ll then be given a selection.

Which one do you want to use? I could choose the one that has already been filled or I can choose the one that is not being shown by default but is also available for this site since it’s already filled this, I’m not going to make any changes and just say log in. And see, to change passwords on this account, I believe that’s Account Details, Current Passwords, so now I’m going to change the password for this account and I’m going to do it the right way this time. I’m going to have LastPass generate for me a secure password. I tend to prefer easy to read, alphanumeric only, 20 characters in length. So that password has been copied to the clipboard and I can now paste it.

And of course, it’s a strong password and hit “save”. We’ll get rid of Edge again, because I don’t want it to save any passwords. But you’ll notice LastPass said, “Hey. I know this, I know this site, askleo.com. This account, I have an entry for. But it looks like you’re changing the password. Would you like me to update my vault with that new password? And of course, the answer is yes. I do want to update that vault with the new password. So one of the things you can then do, though, is for this example, account. Another feature of LastPass is that if we go into edit it, you can see this little, it looks like a clock face with a backwards pointing arrow around it. That is your password history. So you can actually click on that and see the different passwords that have been used on that account. These are the passwords that LastPass has saved for you in the past.

So if you happen to forget your current password or a service is asking you as part of your account recovery, give me any of like the three most recent passwords on this account, you can go to LastPass and you can get that information. Let me at least show you that one change turning off, “remember, passwords” in Edge since we’ve got this, since we’ve got LastPass installed and ready to remember our passwords for us. we don’t need Edge to do that for us. And let’s see, passwords, offer to save passwords, never. Sign in automatically if it knows, never, because it’s not going to know and you can see that it did save one password.

And just so that you’re aware, you’ll notice I didn’t have to do any additional authentication. It’s possible that if I click on this eyeball icon here, I may need to confirm my log in account, my Windows account. But this actually would allow anybody who can walk up to your machine to then view the password. I’ve actually got an article on that on Ask Leo!. One of the several reasons I so strongly recommend against using browser-based password management. I’m just going to delete it.

So now we have no saved passwords and we are no longer going to ask about passwords here in Microsoft Edge. Go back home to askleo.com. and so on that note, I think I’m going to call this live webinar. done. I would like to thank everybody who was here today. As always, there will be a recording. The YouTube page that you’re on right now will persist. It will turn from the live event into a recording of the live event. And as I’ve done with previous webinars, I will probably produce a trimmed version of the live event and host that over on askleo.com as well. So thank you again for being here. It’s I wish you well. May your technology always work. May stay healthy and happy and have yourselves a good rest of the weekend. Take care of you. One. Be well.