i hate you firefox password rememberer
My computer is really pissing me off this week. Maybe it’s because I’ve been burning the midnight oil on a super awesome new project for work, but I feel like all things computer-y are annoying me. My brand new laptop is being bitch, even after “upgrading” from Vista to XP (which, by the way, is NOT a trivial operation). And, to top it off, my wifi card is dying and ThinkPad support is NOT being my friend on that. Dammit, I should have just gotten the MacBook when I had the chance, I’m being punished for being PC guy. Not that I want to be Justin Long… I mean seriously? Those are the choices we have? PC Guy or Justin Long? Hmm. I digress.
Firefox is on my poo-list for today. Why? Well, first, for some reason, today it was being an poohole and crashing all the time, and had to be fixed with the Flashblock extension. The web kind of is the suck without flash, imho. I like all of the little distracting little things that decorate the web all over the place. Although, it’s scary to see how many people use Flash for simple things like, um, a header.
But no, that’s not why I’m pissed off. It’s because of this:
Yes, it’s the Firefox password rememberer. It’s a fantastic feature, and I really like to not have to remember my passwords, but I think that the UI flow is all wrong. (And, thanks to my Windows XP upgrade, I’ve had to re-train Firefox to re-remember all of my passwords)..
Anyway, here’s what usually happens when I go to a site now:
- I enter my username/password.
- Firefox asks if I want to remember that
- I say.. Yes! (Thanks Firefox! You’re so nice.)
- It’s the wrong password. Crap.
I mean… shouldn’t it ask if I want to remember the password AFTER I am successfully logged in? C’mon.. that would make a lot more sense. Sheeza.
Yes, I could just turn it off, but that’s the easy way out.
January 27th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Wait, there’s an “upgrade” from Vista to XP? Wouldn’t it be downgrade? While XP certainly is the right way to go… not blowing the machine away clean to do the XP install sounds otherwise like fuckin voodoo to me.
But I digress. You should have gotten a MBP, run your Windows world in VMware like the champ you are man. Then when it gets all ‘flakey on you’ down the line, it’s time for Time Machine to roll back the well behaving VM.
Oh right, Firefox needs to change that UI too. Or again, get the MBP and Keychain does all the pwd goodness (there’s actually a better app called 1Password that loves the Mac world over).
January 27th, 2008 at 11:27 am
joe…. you’re right, maybe I should have gotten the MBP, but I dunno, I have like 26 years of PC history invested, starting with the IBM PC XT… Actually, one of my big pet peeves about macs is that they only have 1 mouse button. Yah, I know you can add a 1 2-button, but on the laptop itself, i kind of like having multiple buttons. That said, my brother swears by macs now, so I think I’m on the verge of the switch — we’ll see. The funny thing is — people always come to me with mac questions, and when I tell them that I’m not a “mac guy” they always are surprised… Not sure how I should take that.
But yah, “upgrading” to XP from Vista was a ridiculous thing I had to do.. (I updated my post with “quotes,” btw…)
That said, 1password looks really good — the thinkpad has a keychain application that, but I found the UI annoying, so I turned it off. Maybe I’ll give it a go again.
February 29th, 2008 at 12:23 am
If you put in the wrong password just go back to the site and login again. FF will automatically update the password attached to that username. It’s for instances like you describe and also if you go to a site and change the password FF would need to then update the entry. It does this automatically. So feel comfortable hitting remember then using an incorrect password. It won’t matter, you’ll get sent back and have to reenter the proper one. FF will just keep updating the entry until, you’ve got a successful login, at which point you wouldn’t enter a new password because you’d be happy with what FF filled in.
Probably a little more verbose than I needed to be.