Excuse me for butting in as a newcomer to PWM, but can't we take a leaf out of Firefox's own book here? I've read this thread and understand about the difficulty of second-guessing fields in badly coded forms, but Firefox's Saved Passwords mechanism works beautifully for me - wouldn't it be possible to figure out how do they do it and copy the technique?
I'd be surprised if Eric hasn't already been looking there to create what he already has, but I feel your pain.
As a newcomer, my first impression of using PWM (other than that this is a really high quality extension with fantastic support) is that there are way too many broken forms out there, and as a result there is a serious usability issue involved with requiring a user to create a new PWM account every time they discover one.
I don't think its quite what I'd call a *serious* usability issue, but I agree that there may be a better way. Sadly, I'm not a programmer, so I'm not in a position to make meaningful suggestions for *how* to improve on it.
To be honest, I'm quite happy with this aspect the way it is.
We need something that will learn which (possibly broken) field represents a username the first time the user fills it in, and then automatically remembers it.
I'm sure Eric would appreciate any patches, or pointers on how to do this...
There are good reasons for a user wanting multiple usernames across different sites, and Firefox's Saved Passwords automatically learns username field names and values where as PWM doesn't.
Yes, but what Firefox does and what PWM does are two completely different things. That said, maybe there is something there that Eric could use, but like I said before, I'd be surprised if he hadn't already looked closely at it - Eric?
As a result of this I am in serious doubt over whether PWM is currently practical for me to use, even though I love the concept, and the implementation seems to be 99% there.
I really can't see how the disadvantage of *occasionally* having to create a new account for a site that has a broken form disqualifies PWM as a whole. The convenience factor, with the added security that can be had from using custom accounts (for financial sites, etc), makes it - for me - by far the most valuable program on my computer - but to each his own...
Or is the correct approach/workaround to simply not use PWM's username features at all and rely on Firefox's ability to save form data correctly to remember the correct username for any given site? This would seem a shame - if PWM has username support it would be great for it to work as well as or better than Firefox's native functionality.
Apologies in advance if I've misunderstood something!
Adam
I don't think you've misunderstood anything, I just think you're missing the point... PWM has dramatically simplified my online life so much so that I truly cannot imagine going without it. It would be worse than going back to dial-up (no, I'm not kidding)...
Charles