754398 - The "Saved Passwords" window should be non-modal

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Giorgio Maone [:ma1]]

Users of the "Copy password" (and/or of the hopefully soon to be implemented "Copy username", bug 656011) command in the "Saved Passwords" window might need to paste it in an web content input field, possibly because he wants to try the stored credentials for a different site or, more commonly, because the subdomain (www -> secure) or the scheme (http -> https) has changed, preventing the password manager from "remembering".

I frankly don't know how prevalent this use case is, but I know for sure this is the reason why I open the password manager in more than 90% of the cases.

The fact the dialog is modal prevents me from trying more than one entry, or even from copying the username (manually for now) and the password of a single entry together: I need to close the dialogs, paste, reopening the dialog, reentering the master password and finally make my second attempt. 

To be honest, in Firefox < 15 there's a loophole which allows me to "demodalize" the window by closing its opener, the Options window. Unfortunately this loophole is gone now that we've got in-content options (bug 718011).

Hence this bug to get rid of modality in the "Saved Passwords" window before in-content options make it unusable (for me at least).

Of course this change will make an even stronger case for bug 719103.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This didn't used to be Modal on Mac, but with the switch to in-content, it is now modal. On windows it was hard to tell as windows has always had a modal options dialog.

Bug 737177 seemed to do an explicit switch to making it modal, but there was no explanation as to why.

Anyone any idea why? For me, changing the dialog to a sheet on mac is really a regression.

(This should possibly be in a new bug, but recent comments elsewhere seem to point to here).

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This is now wfm in the latest Firefox builds - the dialog is now per tab modal.