Here’s a question: Using any of Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, the Mozilla Suite, or Netscape, have you ever purposely clicked on the ‘Remove All’ button, in the password manager?
Follow up question: Have you ever clicked on it by accident?
Clicking on it by accident, is easy, when it sits right beside ‘Remove’ button. Luckily, the closest I’ve come to that, is removing all cookies, not passwords. The scary part is that there is no “Are you sure” prompt, asking for confirmation. One accidental click, and ‘poof’, data is gone.
I’ve been able to avoid this by removing the ‘Remove All’ button. If you’re using Firefox or Thunderbird, add the following script to your userChrome.css file, to remove the ‘Remove All’ button from the password manager:
#removeAllSignons {display: none !important;}
I have a style on userstyles.org that also removes the different “Clear X Now” buttons from the Privacy section of the preferences, in Firefox 1.5, at least. 🙂
The relevant bug is 266945 – vote for it!
Yes, I have used it. No not by accident.
And what about adding confirmation dialog on Remove all button in main codebase?
Your post just made me think of something — Why do we have to specify “!important”? Shouldn’t stuff just know that if I went to the trouble of writing the userFoo.css file in the first place, that the things in it are by definition important?
Bug 266945 asks for a confirmation dialog, but since a user can do multiple select items in this list, and since the feature is somewhat made redundant by the clear private data settings … I’m pretty sure that yanking is the right thing to do.
Actually, thinking further, I think “Remove All” is valuable there, but needs to be protected better via a confirmation dialog. The Password Manager is a manager, and having the button there supports the taskflow of first viewing one’s saved passwords and then making the call on whether or not they want to clear them.
I accidnetally removed all cookies. What a pain that was to fix! Passwords would have been even worse!
Notice that if you want to merely VIEW stored passwords, you get an “Are you sure?” screen before they show the passwords.
But if you want to DELETE all passwords, or cookies as well, POOF and they’re gone like a fart on a breeze. No warning, no second chance, no nothing. Just gone. The developers who continue to ignore this flaw should be flogged in the village square.
“The developers who continue to ignore this flaw…”
Before my blog post gets any further misunderstood, if you look at the corresponding bug, you’ll see that it is approved as a Firefox 2 blocker. In other words, Firefox 2 will not be released, if that bug isn’t fixed.
My post was just passing on a solution for current versions, especially for those, who have no use for the button at all, like me. 🙂
Just to point out that it removes the “removeAll” from the form manager.
Asrail, neither Firefox, nor Thunderbird have a form manager.
SeaMonkey has one form manager and this trick removes the “Remove all” from the site list.
Tools->Form manager->Manage sites.
2Asrail: Thanks.
Mozilla Firefox it the best web broswer for Windows/Linux/MacOS 🙂