271235 - password manager no longer saves new passwords

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, defect)

Description

[Josh Kelley]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

The password manager stopped offering to save newly entered usernames and
passwords.  Usernames and passwords that were already entered continued to work.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit a web site (such as sourceforge.net).
2. Log in.
3. Log out.
4. Go back to login page.

Actual Results:  
Username and password are not entered.

Expected Results:  
Username and password are entered.

Renaming signons.txt in my profile directory and letting Mozilla recreate it
fixed this problem.  I have a copy of the old (somehow corrupt?) signons.txt; if
you'd like me to provide a copy through some private channel, or if there's
anything I can check in it, please let me know.

Comment 1

[Tracey Clark]

I was experiencing the same problem just after upgrading to Firefox 1.0.4 on
Windows 2000.
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8)
Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

When I upgraded to 1.0.4 it would not load with my old profile, so I had created
a new one. I had deliberately copied the signons.txt from my old profile to the
new one. The behavior I experienced was the same as reported originally by
Brian. An additional note is that when going to a website that I didn't have
stored password information for, Firefox would not prompt me as expected to
choose whether or not to save the password for the site. 

In Firefox, I cleared all saved passwords. When I opened the signons.txt file,
however, it still had a lot of encrypted entries for different websites. The
problem was not solved, Firefox still would not remember passwords. I renamed
the signon.txt file, and reopened Firefox so it would create a new one. Firefox
now remembers passwords as expected.

Comment 2

[Taral]

Same here. It's extraordinarily annoying. Nominating.

Comment 3

[Taral]

Hm, renaming signons.txt, starting, closing, putting it back... now PM is
working again. Corruption elsewhere?

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Without knowing how files got horked, it's hard to fix this type of thing, and a
corrupt file can indeed cause this.

Comment 5

[Taral]

Looks like this was due to sites adding "autocomplete=off" to their forms. Gotta
love greasemonkey.

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Without a steps to reproduce that's consistently usable, this isn't going to be considered for blocking.

Comment 7

[Josh Kelley]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Without knowing how files got horked, it's hard to fix this type of thing, and
> a
> corrupt file can indeed cause this.
> 

Even without steps to reproduce, couldn't Firefox be updated to check for and recover from a corrupt signons.txt?

Comment 8

[Chris Wood]

Re comment #5, the greasemonkey script Allow Password Remembering (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/588) is a *partial* workaround.

Comment 9

[Chris Wood]

Or you could use the Always Remember Password extension (http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/03/always-remember-password/#more-10) or Jesse Ruderman's remember password bookmarklet (http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/forms.html#remember_password). Still only partial workarounds, AFAIK.

Comment 10

[David P James]

Mass edit: Changing QA to default QA Contact

Comment 11

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

If someone still has a broken signons.txt, I'll investigate. 

Comment 12

[Michael Wu [:mwu]]

This sounds like a permissions issue (no write permission..). I guess we should improve the reading/writing of signons.txt when it comes to errors.

Comment 13

[Nilanjan]

I am facing the same problem. How do I add passwords (new or old) to the password manager? Why dont they improve this interface? Also, I have no idea where my profile directory is - how do I open it and change the name of the signon.txt file?

Thanks.
Nilanjan (Pls reply to me at : [e-mail])


(In reply to comment #1)
> I was experiencing the same problem just after upgrading to Firefox 1.0.4 on
> Windows 2000.
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8)
> Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
> 
> When I upgraded to 1.0.4 it would not load with my old profile, so I had created
> a new one. I had deliberately copied the signons.txt from my old profile to the
> new one. The behavior I experienced was the same as reported originally by
> Brian. An additional note is that when going to a website that I didn't have
> stored password information for, Firefox would not prompt me as expected to
> choose whether or not to save the password for the site. 
> 
> In Firefox, I cleared all saved passwords. When I opened the signons.txt file,
> however, it still had a lot of encrypted entries for different websites. The
> problem was not solved, Firefox still would not remember passwords. I renamed
> the signon.txt file, and reopened Firefox so it would create a new one. Firefox
> now remembers passwords as expected.

Comment 14

[Ale Mand]

I have a differente case: a form for which "don't save" was selected, appears in the list of sites with exceptions (options, security, passwords, exceptions).
Removing the website from exception does not popup the "save passowrd" dialog box any more.

Comment 15

[Tracy Walker [:tracy]]

sourceforge.net login is remembered for me using nightly trunk build on windows from 2007-01-29.... also adding a site to the exceptions list...then removing it...then logging in again correctly asks me what to do.