I encountered something like this at work. It wasn’t pass related, it was just a means of getting people to make text responses. Ampersands were replaced with some gibberish format, which annoyed everyone.

I got some kind of explanation from our tech people, which I understood to mean that ampersand was used to indicate that what followed was live code. Turning the ampersand into gibberish text was a safety measure to stop mischief.

I’ve noticed ampersand replacements in some news feeds too

Yes, that’s true. Keychain Access helps a lot.

My understanding is that your GF will be using Apple’s KeyChain, which is pretty good except that it’s hard to look inside and manually edit. It’s not just in Safari.

The upcoming Password app is just a nice user interface to KeyChain. So no change to the functionality as such, but I think it’ll make a big difference to how it’s used.

I have used OpenOffice on Macs.

Also there are some free Apple apps that aren’t installed by default. (GarageBand and one for making gifs)

That sounds right. I think I remember paying for iWork back then too.