Why Can’t Firefox Remember del.icio.us Passwords?

The Firefox password manager mostly works, but they’re a few sites whose passwords it can’t seem to collect or remember no matter what. Del.icio.us is the most prominent. Speakeasy is another.

Does anyone have any idea why this or how to fix it? I’ve confirmed it with Firefox 2 on both Mac and Windows. Possibly these sites are doing something weird with JavaScript. I can’t see anything in the plain HTML that would cause this problem. If they are deliberately blocking the remembering of passwords, I wish they’d stop. It’s very annoying, and will just lead to me choosing a more memorable but much more easily guessable password than the one I use to secure my password vault.

4 Responses to “Why Can’t Firefox Remember del.icio.us Passwords?”

  1. douglips Says:

    There is an attribute for the form called “autocomplete”, and if a website sets this to “off” then a browser will not attempt to remember the password.

    There is a firefox extension and bookmarklet designed to “fix” this.

    firefox extension
    bookmarklet

    There are however other ways to prevent your browser from remembering the password, such as having a fake password field or some kind of javascript form submission, so this might not always work for paranoid sites.

  2. Carey Says:

    I think the culprit in both cases is the autocomplete attribute. There are a number of Greasemonkey scripts to remove it from various sites.

  3. Elliotte Rusty Harold Says:

    It seems you’re right. Not sure how I missed that. Thanks!

    autocomplete=”off” is really obnoxious (and insecure). Only the client knows whether it can safely store the password on a given machine. In my case, if I can autocomplete passwords, then I use a very hard to guess, randomly generated password that’s unique for the site. If I can’t autocomplete, I have to use something more memorable, less unique, and less secure.

  4. Forcing Firefox to remember passwords for del.icio.us (and other sites that turn off autocomplete) | The Greatest Linux Blog on the Internets. Says:

    […] when I get online. Luckly, Elliotte Rusty Harold had noticed this mis-feature too, and has found a solution to get del.icio.us to accept the passwords remembered by Firefox. Be sure to read the comments to his post, since his helpful readers have provided several […]

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