389208 - Option to prevent password autofill by default (e.g. to keep master password dialog from popping up when I don't want to log in)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 359675

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, enhancement)

Description

[DigitAl56K]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5

Password manager can be infuriating when a master password is set and login credentials are stored for a site that you do not actually want to log into. For example, if I have a password saved for Digg.com and wish to visit several articles on that site but do not desire to log in, Password manager will pop up the dialog box asking for the master password every time I load a new page because Digg.com shows a login form on each page.

This could be remedied by having a preference, "Automatically fill login forms with saved passwords", which could be on by default, but would avoid Firefox automatically entering form data or prompting for the master password when it is not actually my intent to log in to a website.

Perhaps there could be some menu option or button on the UI that would become active and allow me to fill forms and logins if I actually wanted to do so at a later time.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

Does setting http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signon.autofillForms to false suppress the master password dialog?

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 385951, "It should be possible to select 'don't ask again' when prompted for master password".

Comment 3

[mmortal03]

> Desired behavior: a setting should exist where a master password is not required
> for website use, but is required to view stored passwords.

This is crucially important.  I happen to want to protect my passwords from
being viewed in the options, but I do NOT want it to prompt me for my master
password at every site that it happens to try and pre-fill the password field. 
That behavior is just extremely annoying, especially on sites like ESPN where
the password field is on EVERY PAGE, and I don't always need to log in.

Maybe slightly modify the current behavior as follows:  It will prompt
you for your master password for pre-filling purposes ONLY when you physically
click on the password field at issue, and otherwise, leave it blank.  That
would keep the security feature of this option, but remove the annoyance factor
that is bred by prompting you on page load, which is usually before you are ready.  This would be seamless to use.  You would click the password field you want, like you were logging in and going to type in the password, and it would prompt you for your master password, you would type that, hit Enter, and it would fill in the field with the stored password, and then you could hit Enter again to actually log in.

Besides that possibility, we do need a simplified version of this option that
doesn't deal in protecting pre-fills at all, and just protects the view
passwords feature in the options.

Setting signon.autofillForms to false isn't a proper solution, because some websites don't have you type in your login name at all, as it is remembered in the cookies (like ESPN).  Instead, like I said above, if Firefox would just wait until you click on the password field to prompt you for your master password, it could still be auto filling your login name for you, for pages that don't have a login name, it would work without that, and we also would have this annoyance of the prompting on page load.

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Too many issues in this bug. Some are covered by the bugs mentioned in previous comments, same should be generally fixed with the Firefox 3 password manager, and the rest seems to be covered by bug 359675.