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You have maybe noticed, when you log in to PayPal, Yahoo! Mail, Live Mail and some other websites, that Firefox 3 does not give you the option to save the name & password for you, which in certain cases is a nuisance.

The reason? Security. In the forms of these websites, in the field INPUT, the following code appears:

<input autocomplete="off" type="..." ... />

When "autocomplete" is ‘off’, then the browser (quite correctly) does not give the user the option of saving the password for him. For websites, such as PayPal, for example, using which you can transfer small or large sums of money, this is a very wise approach.

On the other hand, in this case, you have to manually type each time your username and/or password, which can be quite annoying (especially if they are very long/secure). If you are using your own computer/laptop, and you think that you do not need that extra bit of security, there is a very easy way to make Firefox 3 to remember the passwords even for these secure websites, which set autocomplete to “off”.

Here’s how:

(The instructions below are for Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition; if you use another operating system (Windows Vista, MacOS X or some of the distributions of Linux), search in an analogical way!)

Step One: Close Firefox browser (if it is open).

Step Two: Navigate to the directory where Firefox is installed, and then open ‘components’ — here is the exact location in Windows XP Professional:
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\

Step Three: Open with Notepad or any other plain text editor the following file:
nsLoginManager.js

Step Four: Find the code:

  _isAutocompleteDisabled : function (element) {
    if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
        element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
        return true;
    return false;
  },


Step Five: Comment in this JavaScript code three lines, as shown below:

  _isAutocompleteDisabled : function (element) {
    // if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
    //     element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
    //     return true;
    return false;
  },


5) Start Firefox again. Done! :-)

Now, when you login to websites, which do not allow the browser to remember usernames and/or passwords, Firefox will offer you the option to save the data, just like in others, not-so-secure websites!

I hope this tip will be useful for someone, beside me… Enjoy! :-)

____________
Some Notes:
(1) Use at your own risk and responsibility! In the case someone succeeds in stealing online all of your millions, thanks to your saved password and my (in)valuable advices, I declare to be deprived of all responsibility! :-)
(2) I am not sure, what will happen, if you update your version of Firefox (for example, 3.0.0 to 3.0.1). It is possible that the changes in the file will be lost and file will be over-written. But this is not such a big trouble, because if you have already logged in into most of these websites, then the usernames/passwords will remain saved — worst case, if need be, you can just make the change in the nsLoginManager.js file again, after a Firefox update!
(3) I used as base for my article information from this comment — but the user, which has left it, unfortunately, did not leave a name or URL, so I can’t give him/her full credits… :-(
(4) I have tested this method with Firefox 3.0.1 (English-US). For earlier versions of Firefox, I am not sure, if it will work — and anyway, I believe that Firefox 2.0.x had quite a different policy in regard to saving usernames and passwords in forms…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 17:04 and is filed under Tips 'n Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.