Having to manage the hundreds of user names and passwords you've had to create over the last ten years can suck. If you also need to keep them synchronized across multiple computers in OSX, Windows, and Linux, it can get ridiculous. Luckily I've been down this road before, and here are my three recommendations. I personally use XP, Leopard, and Ubuntu, and these setups work for me.

Firefox and Weave / Password Exporter

Firefox comes built-in with a great password manager to handle all of the web sites that you need to store credentials from, and it's very intuitive and non-intrusive. Remember to create a Master Password in the Security settings so that no one can see your saved passwords. One of Firefox's biggest assets is its vast community of extension developers, and this comes in very handy to keep passwords synchronized:

• Weave synchronizes your Firefox bookmarks, history, passwords, preferences, even tabs across browser instances. Your data is saved on the Mozilla servers but if you'd rather use your own you can do that too.
• Password Exporter can export and import your Firefox passwords in XML and CSV formats. Obviously you'll need to export/import quite often, but if you don't trust your data in the cloud then this could be a good alternative for you.

KeePass and DropBox

KeePass is an open-source, well-known, secure password manager. It has all the bells and whistles, including a handy password generator for when you want nice random strong passwords. Here are all of the download links:

• Windows
• OSX
• Ubuntu

In terms of having the passwords available across multiple computers, you have a couple options:

• Dropbox is essentially a cloud backup service which safely stores up to 2GB for free. It's a small program that runs on your computer and creates a folder whose contents are shared across all of your other computers (you install it on every computer). What you can then do is have all of your KeePass instances use one same password file in the shared folder, always synchronized as long as they are online.
• Again, if you're someone who doesn't trust having data in the cloud, you can download and install the Portable version of KeePass on a USB drive and carry it around. You can then plug it in to any computer you go to and retrieve your passwords safely.

Clipperz

Clipperz is a password repository in the cloud. It saves your data on its server and it (understandably) goes to great lengths to keep your data secure. For example, you cannot recover a lost password. If you forget it, you're out of luck. One great feature of Clipperz is that it has 'direct logins' so that once you've saved your credentials for a specific site it will create a one-click login link to it and place it in a easily accessible launch box. This means that you can use Clipperz as a launcher for all of your online sites without needing to worry about credentials at all.Obviously if you're someone who has issues with having your data saved in the cloud there is not much you can do in the way of alternatives. If you're the more paranoid kind, don't use Clipperz. But if you're not, it offers a nice centralized way of dealing with all of your web passwords.