409795 - Data filled in a web is used in others if field name is the same

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Form Manager, enhancement)

Description

[roberjruiz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; es-ES; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; es-ES; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

When I fill a form in a web, firefox remembers the last inputs I made. Ok up to that point. The problem is that if I go to another web and it has a form field with the same name, it also shows the last entries that I wrote in the other web form. I didn't check if form name/id was also the same.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make sure that your web browser is storing the information you fill in forms
2. Go to google and search for something. For example, Stargate
3. Go to www.imdb.com, and in the search box, begin to write Stargate. 
Actual Results:  
When you begin to write the word "Stargate", you will notice that Firefox will autocomplete the word, even if you never searched for that word in the imdb web. That's because the field name of the search box is "q" in both webs. The same happens in www.mozilla.org, and in several webs with username field (fortunately not with the password)

Expected Results:  
Information stored from forms should be separated for forms that are on different web pages. I think it should differenciate by server name

It is a behaviour I dislike, but don't really know if it is a bug or an intented feature, so I will mark it as a new feature request.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

It's actually the whole point of the Form Manager. If you want to exclude certain sites, see bug 385741.

Comment 2

[roberjruiz]

The problem is not autofill by itself, nor site exclusion. The problem is that it is storing the information I fill in a website (let's say google), and using it to autofill the forms in completely different websites (imdb and mozilla.org for example). Is it possible to prevent firefox from mixing information that comes from different sites?

Comment 3

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Actual Results:  
> When you begin to write the word "Stargate", you will notice that Firefox will
> autocomplete the word, even if you never searched for that word in the imdb
> web. That's because the field name of the search box is "q" in both webs.

This behaviour can be always observed with Firefox 2.0.0.6 and Firefox latest-trunk, by accessing www.google.com & www.imdb.com as you say.

It doesn't seems to be "notice that Firefox will autocomplete the word".
Rather, it looks to be similar feature to "submenu for string typed in the past" ("History" like feature) for Search bar, instead of "pre-fill or auto-fill of form by Form Manager".
 (By "Remember what I enter in the search bar" part,                          )
 (not by "Remember what I enter in forms" part,                               ) 
 (of Tools/Options/Privacy/"Remember what I enter in forms and the search bar")
And, current implementation of the feature for <INPUT TYPE="TEXT"> looks to be based on Form name/ID and/or Element name/ID, and looks to have no relation to URL of the web page.

If this is true, and if this is intentional, I think it's very confusing design/implementation, when a field in a form of a web page instead of an XUL element.

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Confirming because this is how it works, but undecided if this is something we want to change or not.

Comment 5

[Matthew Cline]

Yeah, this is something that bothers me as well.  The search terms that I want to use on one site are different than the ones I want to use on a different one, but all the sites use "search" as the name of the text field, so I get candidates for auto-completion that make no sense for the site that's currently being used.

Comment 6

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Feature, not a bug! This makes form history more useful (especially with the better frecency weighting being worked on, ala awesomebar).

Comment 7

[Matthew Cline]

Filed Bug 503997, which would allow extensions to implement this feature-request's desired behavior.