Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

There are certain sites that I use, where I use the dangerous feature of having Firefox remember my password....even though the site has disabled autocomplete as part of its security measures.

I did this by using a bookmarklet that hacked the currently loaded page, etc.

When I upgraded to Firefox 3, those sites stopped working. It would fill in the form when the remembered password, and using the bookmarklet broken the page (the login would fail).

While looking to see where I originally found the bookmarklet, and to see if it had been updated....I came across this:

Always remember password hack for Firefox 3

If you’re on Firefox 3 you can just edit your Firefox installation to get the “Always remember password feature” without having to run some JavaScript code on every page load:

• Shutdown Firefox
• Backup the file PATH_TO_YOUR_FIREFOX_INSTALLATION/components/nsLoginManager.js.

• Edit PATH_TO_YOUR_FIREFOX_INSTALLATION/components/nsLoginManager.js with your favorite text editor and find the following lines:

                if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
                    element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
                    return true;
  

  On the GNU/Linux version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 this code is inside the private method _isAutocompleteDisabled, on the Windows version of Firefox 3 Beta 5 this code can be found inside the local helper function autocompleteDisabled which is part of the private method _onFormSubmit.

  To let Firefox password manager always remember passwords those “autocompleteDisabled”-methods have to always return the value false.

  All you have to do to achieve this is remove the lines above or comment them out like this:

  //          if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&
  //              element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")
  //              return true;
  

• Save your changes and close the editor.
• Restart Firefox - Firefox password manager should now always remember passwords ignoring the autocomplete=”off” attribute.

Now the dangerous thing I've been doing is working again.....