If you are using the default password manager that is built-in to Firefox, you would notice that logging in to websites such as PayPal and Citibank doesn’t prompt you to remember the password. However it seems to work on other websites. Well this is not a bug but it is just the web browsers respecting the autocomplete=”off” code that is on the HTML. Many years ago I’ve shared a tip on how to force Firefox to save password on websites such as Yahoo Mail and Hotmail using a bookmarklet which I can confirm that it is still working today. All you need to do is paste a long string of javascript to the address bar and hit Enter before logging in and the web browser will magically prompt you if you would like to save the password. Below is the HTML source code of the Paypal site that has autocomplete=”off” added to the login form.

If for some reason you don’t want to use the bookmarklet or it doesn’t work and want this feature to be permanently removed, making Firefox to always ignore the autocomplete=”off”, this is how you do it on Firefox 4. It was much easier to do this on Firefox 3 because of the naked nsLoginManager.js file but Firefox 4 has packed all of the .js files into one omni.jar file.


You can refer to my previous article on how to edit files inside omni.jar by first deoptimizing it and then changing the extension from .jar to .zip which will allow you to edit the files in omni.jar.

Once you have done all that, go to components folder and edit the nsLoginManager.js with your favorite text editor (I would recommend Notepad++). Press CTRL+F which will bring up the search box and type _isAutoCompleteDisabled followed by hitting the enter key. The whole code should look like the screenshot below.

Now all you need is to change the value from true to false which I have circled in red. Make sure that the semicolon is still there after the false. Save it and rename the omni.zip back to omni.jar. For best performance and optimization, make sure you re-optimize the jar file by using the –optimize switch with optimizejars.py. As you can see at the screenshot below, I am now able to save my PayPal password on Firefox 4.

Do note that you probably need to go through the whole process of editing the nsLoginManager.js file whenever Firefox 4 gets updated. If you’re using LastPass to manage all your saved passwords, then you do not need to worry about this because by default LastPass does not respect AutoComplete=off. You can either enable or disable that from the LastPass Preferences window. I hope to have the LastPass review with (surprise) posted as soon as I can.