Silently Autosave Passwords In Firefox

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:05:11 +0000

The problem with a lot of Internet users is lack of any idea about password management, so if they get their computer replaced, they go as far as creating new Yahoo! or Gmail accounts simply because the previous credentials were saved into their browser, and they simply forgot any kind of info related to them. While this time won’t talk about password management itself, this is also a pretty interesting password-related subject: silently autosaving passwords in Firefox.

Obviously, allowing Firefox to save your user names and passwords won’t make any other noise apart from the mouse click needed, and this is exactly what I had in mind – saving passwords without asking a confirmation! Sure, the evil minds reading this could also use this Firefox hack to steal other people’s accounts… without actually stealing their passwords!

As a final addition to the last phrase above, I think it could be possible to retrieve those passwords already save with the help of some additional program, but I will be honest – I simply don’t care about that, and my advice is to stay away from other people’s account, all right? Good!

Now, let’s get to the hack itself, shall we? First of all, I have to thank Raymond for writing about this subject and giving me the idea of going after it, too. All the credits for hacking the .JS file I’ll tell you about next also go to him. Great job, Raymond!

If you really want to get rid of that bar having the Remember, Never for This Site and Not Now buttons, here’s what you should do after closing Firefox…

1. Open a text editor (my favorite is Notepad++, as you can see in the image above)

2. Open the file nsLoginManagerPrompter.js, located in the components folder of your Firefox main directory (for example, default location should be C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\)

3. Go to the _showSaveLoginNotification function and remove everything between lines 642 to 711, or until you find the _removeLoginNotifications funtion, if you’re going to use the Search feature instead of checking the line number…

4. Replace that section with these two lines of code:
var pwmgr = this._pwmgr;
pwmgr.addLogin(aLogin);

5. Save the file and open Firefox.

That’s all, folks! Now, all your user names and passwords will be saved automatically, so be sure to use this feature carefully… and avoid using Firefox on public computers, since someone else could have done this and turned this notorious browser into some kind of keylogger!

Tabberwocky, a Tab Mix Plus Alternative

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:52:05 +0000

In the last few years, Opera became my primary browser and still hangs on in there. I know that Chrome is faster and I am aware that Firefox has more extensions than any other browser, but I won’t change my browsing habits anytime soon. Sure, it’s mainly because I feel much better with 40 open tabs in Opera than in Firefox, but Tab Mix Plus is an excellent tool to help power users keep a lot of tabs open in Firefox and feel good while doing it, and if you’re feeling this addon is a bit too much for your needs… today I have some good news for you!

Tabberwocky, that’s my piece of news for you now, and despite the fact its current version number is only 0.9.8, things are looking good here – after 7,970 downloads and 20 reviews, this addon has a 5 star rating. On the other hand, Tab Mix Plus was downloaded no less than 11,194,127 times and got 1149 reviews, currently being the proud owner of 5 stars, too, but…

… if you’re one of those people using a lot of addons, you may want to think about size, too, because Tabberwocky has only 25 KB, while Tab Mix Plus is a pretty fat one, being about 8 times larger!

When it comes to features, Tabberwocky has a lot of things Firefox geeks need in such a tool, although I am sure there’s room for various additions, especially when it comes to localizing this plugin (this is also the main reason for holding back the release of version 1.0, lack of enough localized versions – at least according to the official page).

For example, Tabberwocky, superT’s successor, allows to duplicate/protect tabs, have a multiple-row tab bar, as well as tab progress bars, highlight unread tabs, open those script-generated windows in tabs (excellent feature, if you ask me), and many more.

Setting it up is pretty easy, and I think you shouldn’t have any special problems getting started with it. Other than the above, it’s all about installing Tabberwocky and starting to open tabs… 10, 20, 30, 100 of them – no need to worry about being organized, only worry about your computer running out of free memory!

PCTips3000 » Firefox

Silently Autosave Passwords In Firefox

Tabberwocky, a Tab Mix Plus Alternative