In the iOS 15.4, iPadOS 15.4, and macOS Monterey 12.3 betas, Apple has added a minor quality of life improvement to the way Safari saves passwords. At the current time, Safari will gladly save a password without a username, which can lead to confusion later, but that's no longer the case in the beta updates.
When you are prompted to save a password to iCloud Keychain in iOS 15.4, iPadOS 15.4, or macOS Monterey 12.3 and Safari has only detected a password, Safari will pop up a window asking for a user name. "To save this password, enter the username for your [website] account," reads the alert.
Details about the new feature were shared by Safari Apple employee Ricky Mondello, after they were asked about it on Twitter. According to Mondello, Apple made the change to "address a pain point" with the way that Safari and iCloud Keychain operate, and the update will indeed cut down on instances where a password is saved without a username.
In iOS 15.4 beta and macOS 12.3 beta, when Safari isn’t sure, it’ll prompt you for the username for a password, rather than silently save it sans user name. Sometimes Safari will prefill its best guess here. And we didn’t sneak it in. We intentionally addressed a pain point. 😎 https://t.co/mfrcXk9GT6 — Ricky Mondello (@rmondello) February 16, 2022
iOS 15.4 also adds notes to iCloud Keychain and it lets you hide password update alerts, so there are quite a few useful updates in the betas. For a full rundown of everything in iOS 15.4, we have a dedicated features guide.
