453098 - Corrupted signons2.txt disables password manager

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 451155

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, defect)

Description

[Samuli Kärkkäinen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: 

My signons2.txt was mildly corrupted, which resulted in password manager behaving as if it were disabled.

A site with an 8-bit character in its HTTP authentication domain name had resulted in Firefox 2 creating two entries in signons2.txt, where UTF-8 representation of the 8-bit character was repeated a very large number of times, such that the total line lengths were 1048604 and 32806 bytes.

When I updated to Firefox 3, password manager didn't show any entries in the Saved Passwords dialog, and didn't automatically fill in any credentials in
HTTP authentication or login forms. Something did automatically fill in some form login fields, but probably never passwords.

When I moved away signons2.txt, empty signons3.txt was created when Firefox 3 started, and things worked normally.

I removed signons3.txt, restored signons2.txt and removed the two broken entries from it using a text editor. When I started Firefox 3, it read signons2.txt, created signons3.txt with equivalent contents, and is now working as expected.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Bug 451155 most likely fixed the UTF8 issue.

It's not always possible for pwmgr to detect corruption in the flat text file used for storage in FF2/FF3... FF3.1 will use a SQL database, though.