How to Force Firefox to Save Passwords from Secure HTTPS Websites?

Mozilla Firefox is one of the most,  stable,  fast and secure web browsers available today. Most of the ‘geeks’ are using it for a very long time and now a significant portion of general public too! Firefox ships with a built-in password manager; a blessing for users by enabling them safely store and manage a number of passwords. In general as soon as we type in the username and password in a website and click the signin button Firefox will offer an option to save the entered login credentials.

The only problem is that for secure / HTTPS (SSL encrypted) webpages this won’t happen! In addition to that web forms can be programmed to disable the Auto Complete feature (using autocomplete=”off”) .  Since Firefox is compliant to this standard it won’t offer to save the passwords. Now how can we force Firefox to offer the Remember Password option?

1. Close all Firefox Windows.
2. Navigate to the Firefox installation folder and open the file nsLoginManager.js using your favorite text editor like notepad.  In general, the path should be:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\nsLoginManager.js

3. Search for _isAutocompleteDisabled : function (element) {.  The code should look like this:

_isAutocompleteDisabled : function (element) {

if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&

element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")

return true;

return false;

},

4. Delete or comment the three lines after the searched line.

_isAutocompleteDisabled : function (element) {

//if (element && element.hasAttribute("autocomplete") &&

//element.getAttribute("autocomplete").toLowerCase() == "off")

//return true;

return false;

},

OR

_isAutocompleteDisabled : function (element) {

return false;

},

5. Save the file and close the text editor.

Once the above steps are completed, Firefox will prompt the Remember Password option for all the HTTPS sites and forms where Autocomplete is set as ‘off’.

Note:- Please note that secure websites are designed to deny password saving for a reason! Such webpages are mostly be login pages (e.g. online banking sites, paypal etc.) and if the login credentials are compromised it can do a lot of harm. It is advised to keep this option disabled unless you know what you are doing.

Update (23 March 2011)

This trick won’t work directly in Firefox 4 because of the changes in the file structure. i.e. The file C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\nsLoginManager.js is no longer present. The following steps must be performed to find it!

1. Open the Firefox installation directory and find the file:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\omni.jar

2. Carefully take a copy of this file and save it in a directory like Documents or Desktop.

3. Rename is the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\omni.jar file to something like C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\bak_omni.jar just in case something went wrong. Make sure that all Firefox windows are closed before doing this step.

4. Go to the directory where the file omni.jar is copied in step 2 and extract it to a folder omni using any zip extracting tool like Winzip or WinRAR or 7-zip. If required, rename the file extension to zip (i.e. omni.zip).

5. Now you can find and perform the changes in the omni\components\nsLoginManager.js file. Once completed save the file.

6. Now use your zip extracting tool to create a Zip file of all the contents of the omni directory. It should be created as omni.zip.

7. Rename the omni.zip file to omni.jar and copy it to the Firefox directory C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox.

All set!

Tagged as: firefox, https, password, tips