Mozilla Firefox web browser has a built-in password manager that offers you to store usernames and passwords when you use them the first time on a website. When the next time you have to enter the credentials and you have stored them in Firefox, then Firefox can automatically fill in the credentials for you. Back in the old time, you could export all the stored passwords to an external file easily through add-ons.
Since the newer versions of Firefox after version 57 have dropped direct access to stored passwords by third-party browser extensions, you cannot install a Firefox extension to export the stored passwords. Now you can either use older versions of Firefox web browser along with Classic Add-ons Archive, or you can use an open-source tool called FF Password Exporter for extracting the passwords stored in a Firefox user profile.
FF Password Exporter is an open-source tool that can easily export the passwords stored in your Firefox web browser. The program has been designed using the Electron framework making it unnecessary large for a simple tool. In the user interface of FF Password Exporter, it will detect and select the default user profile for the installed copy of the Firefox web browser.
If you are running a portable version of Firefox, then you have to manually select the folder where the portable Firefox’s user profile files are located. If you don’t know where the profile folder is located, then you can enter about:support in the address bar and you can find the profile folder there.
Once the profile folder is selected, you can enter the master password, if you are using a master password to protect your stored credentials. And finally, you can click on the Export Passwords button to export the saved credentials in form of CSV or JSON files. The output file contains all the credentials in plain-text format so be careful not to share this file with others or leave it lying around on your desktop.
Verdict: FF Password Exporter can quickly export the passwords that you save in Firefox. As the name of the tool suggests it is a password exporter only and does not import the extracted passwords. It is useful only if you want to export the passwords for using in other password managers. If you want to backup and restore the passwords in Firefox, then perhaps you will find MozBackup more useful which still works with newer versions of Firefox even though not being developed anymore.
You can download FF Password Exporter from https://github.com/kspearrin/ff-password-exporter.