[pmwiki-users] Remember Password Feature in Firefox

Peter Bowers pbowers at pobox.com
Wed Mar 9 11:18:36 CST 2011


On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 9:23 AM, jdd-gmane <jdd at dodin.org> wrote:
> II have the same problem. I think Firefox try guessing what page he is
> loading to know what passwd to use, but he is fooled by the PmWiki
> headers to think all are the same page.
>
> I don't think it's a Firefox problem, but a PmWiki one (probably skin
> one), but I don't know how to fix this. Most of the time a browser can
> manage passwd with login, but when there is no login... it's more
> difficult

I don't pretend to be an expert on this, so I may be way off here ...
but if firefox *normally* tried to remember a password based on a
*page* rather than based on a *site* that wouldn't work in most cases,
right?

Imagine, for instance, that you are browsing in a forum and decide to
log in and reply.  That log-in *page* may will be on a different page
each time, but you use one username and password for the *site*.  If
firefox tried to remember a different password for each *page* then it
would be useless in this forum example.

Similarly for many other types of sites that offer different ways to
login.  Often there is a login at the top of every page on a site,
just to be convenient -- but you are going to use the same
username/password on each of these pages.

PmWiki is the exception in that it allows so much flexibility,
offering the possibility of n different passwords on each page.
However, even on PmWiki I'm guessing that roughly 95% of users only
ever use a single password for their entire usage on the site.
Generally it would be only administrators or power users that would
have access to multiple different passwords (although I'm sure there
are various exceptions to this).

So all this to say, I think Firefox is doing the right thing by
remembering one password per *site* rather than per *page*.

If you want a more robust password manager you may want to consider
something like LastPass (free) or RoboForm ($$$) as I believe both of
these packages will allow multiple passwords per site and take their
best guess based on various criteria (or at least let you choose which
one you want)...

Just my $0.02...

-Peter



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