Greasemonkey Hacks

Hack #32. Allow Password Remembering

Let the browser's password manager do its job.

I'm constantly filling out forms with the same data on different sites. Firefox tries to help by remembering past values and autocompleting form fields that it recognizes, but this doesn't always work. What's worse, some sites will use a special HTML attribute to tell the browser not to remember and autocomplete specific form fields. That's fine for sensitive information, such as social security numbers and credit card numbers, but sometimes I want my browser to remember my username or password, even if the site's developers think that's unsafe.

This hack removes that special HTML attribute (autocomplete="off") from all web forms and lets me decide whether I want to let Firefox store my form data and autocomplete it later.

Warning

This script lets you trade convenience for security. Firefox does not encrypt the form data that it stores on your computer. It's up to you to understand the risks of saving your personal information and weigh those risks against the convenience of autocompletion.

The Code

This user script runs on all pages. First, it defines a helper function that neutralizes any autocomplete attribute on an HTML element. Then, it iterates over each form and each of its fields, calling into the helper function for the cleaning.

Tip

This feature was first available in the form of a bookmarklet, a small chunk of JavaScript embedded in a URL and saved as a bookmark. Compared to user scripts, bookmarklets ...