Forcing firefox to remember passwords

There are a handful of websites out there that decide that they know better than your browser and tell it to not offer to save passwords. They do this by setting a form autocomplete attribute to off.

Since we already agree that HTML and the web are a terrible idea, hopefully we can find a way to hack around this. It turns out that I didn’t have to, because many others have solved this hack before me. The cleanest version I found is here: http://www.howtogeek.com/62980/how-to-force-your-browser-to-remember-passwords/

It’s not that complicated actually, a little bookmarklet (javascript code, stored in a bookmark, and activated when you open it) is saved in your browser, and on activation, it loops through all the page’s forms and turns on the autocomplete off‘s.

I’ve copied the code here, in the interests of archiving this very useful hack. Here you go:

Shortened form:

javascript:(function(){var%20ac,c,f,fa,fe,fea,x,y,z;ac="autocomplete";c=0;f=document.forms;for(x=0;x<f.length;x++){fa=f[x].attributes;for(y=0;y<fa.length;y++){if(fa[y].name.toLowerCase()==ac){fa[y].value="on";c++;}}fe=f[x].elements;for(y=0;y<fe.length;y++){fea=fe[y].attributes;for(z=0;z<fea.length;z++){if(fea[z].name.toLowerCase()==ac){fea[z].value="on";c++;}}}}alert("Enabled%20'"+ac+"'%20on%20"+c+"%20objects.");})();

Long form:

function() {
   var ac, c, f, fa, fe, fea, x, y, z;
   //ac = autocomplete constant (attribute to search for)
   //c = count of the number of times the autocomplete constant was found
   //f = all forms on the current page
   //fa = attibutes in the current form
   //fe = elements in the current form
   //fea = attibutes in the current form element
   //x,y,z = loop variables

   ac = "autocomplete";
   c = 0;
   f = document.forms;

   //cycle through each form
   for(x = 0; x < f.length; x++) {
      fa = f[x].attributes;
      //cycle through each attribute in the form
      for(y = 0; y < fa.length; y++) {
         //check for autocomplete in the form attribute
         if(fa[y].name.toLowerCase() == ac) {
            fa[y].value = "on";
            c++;
         }
      }

      fe = f[x].elements;
      //cycle through each element in the form
      for(y = 0; y < fe.length; y++) {
         fea = fe[y].attributes;
         //cycle through each attribute in the element
         for(z = 0; z < fea.length; z++) {
            //check for autocomplete in the element attribute
            if(fea[z].name.toLowerCase() == ac) {
               fea[z].value = "on";
               c++;
            }
         }
      }
   }

   alert("Enabled '" + ac + "' on " + c + " objects.");
}

Happy hacking,

James

PS: Best friends forever if you can get firefox to natively integrate with the gnome-keyring. No I don’t want to force it to myself, get this code merged upstream please!