As usual when I was screening through all the new posts in forum to see if there are any spam and also any computer topic that I can help, I saw an interest question asked by Rizzano. He wanted to know if there is anyway to make Firefox auto save password without clicking the Remember button. In Firefox, even if you have the option “Security Remember passwords for sites” checked in Tools > Options,the browser will still display a notification bar at the top that asks “Do you want Firefox to remember the password for “Username” on website.com?” with three buttons “Remember”, “Never for This Site” and “Not Now”.

Disable Firefox Remember Never for This Site Not Now button
The first thing that came to my mind was perhaps there is an addon that can do this but I couldn’t find any that can make Firefox auto save password without prompting. After spending nearly two hours researching on how Firefox saves the password, I managed to find a way on how to make Firefox save the login information to the Firefox Saved Passwords manager.

First, I searched some of the important keywords such as “Never for This Site” and “Not Now” on all the files and found that this function is controlled by a few javascript .js files. Then I was more confident in getting this to work since I didn’t have to go through the trouble of downloading the Firefox source code, modify and compile it.

When you submit a form with username and password, it will process the function:
1. _onFormSubmit() in nsLoginManager.js
2. promptToSavePassword in nsLoginManagerPrompter.js
3. _showSaveLoginNotification in nsLoginManagerPrompter.js
4. addLogin in nsLoginManager.js

1. Close Firefox
2. Edit nsLoginManagerPrompter.js with notepad which is normally located in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\
3. Replace the entire line 642 to 711 with the code below:

var pwmgr = this._pwmgr;
pwmgr.addLogin(aLogin);

Firefox auto save password without notification bar
Now whenever you login to any website, Firefox will auto save the site, username and password to the login manager WITHOUT showing the notification bar. You can access the saved password area by going to Tools > Options > Security and click the Saved Passwords button. There is one possible bug which is even when a user entered the wrong username or password, it will still be saved.

I am calling this a hack instead of customization because it’s not an included feature in Firefox. I had to manually modify one of it’s original core files to make this work. Thinking about this logically, obviously Firefox did not include such feature nor there is an addon for this because they don’t want the world’s favorite browser to turn into a keylogger. Use it with care and think twice before implementing this illegally as it can get you into a lot of trouble!

[tags]firefox, password, login, notification, save[/tags]