Ideas for Arora: forms autofill, or “Think different”.
Do we need a password manager? I don’t think so.
Is it a good idea to bother the user about whether the form he just submitted should be stored locally or not? I don’t think so!
I think it should be easy to remember any form value easily. I want to control that from the keyboard or the mouse in seconds. This choice is field-related. That’s why it should be simply available from the contextual menu (so, simply using the Menu key on anyone’s modern PC keyboard).
Three states could be useful (I didn’t think a lot about the naming issue):
- Don’t remember (default)
- Remember on this page
- Remember on the whole website/domain
But contextual menu is not visible by default, and this choice should always be visible to the user and intuitive. That’s why I suggest extending the input widgets. Widgets extensions rock, just see how useful and easy it is to resize a multiline input field using drap and drop… Some rounded icon at the right of the field, like the one on the adress bar. Grey by default, which means nothing is stored. Grey when the field value is stored for the page, blue when it is stored for the website. You just have to click it to change this state.
BTW, a central place to control which form items are stored, and forget some would be necessary. It could look like some sort of browser, with a two-pane view.
No mockups for now, but I’m working on it!
Edit: here’s a mockup for the forms autofill values manager (please find a name; and BTW, the lines headers are stupid, there should be 2 columns):
3 Comments to “Ideas for Arora: forms autofill, or “Think different”.”
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This seems to be a very convenient way to remember passwords, as most browsers ask the user only once whether they want or not to save the password. I find this particular behaviour rather irritating as I often tend to press return several times when submitting a form, thus triggering the “Not Now” Button. Whereas with your concept the user is free to change the setting very easily.
Firefox 3 does it another way, by “poping up” some query line (like this yellow line asking whether to trust or not an extension source in FF2) each time you submit a form with a password for the first time. And of course, you are annoyed everytime you REGISTER on a website (why the heck would I want you to remember it? I won’t register again…)
The most annoying thing for me in Firefox being I can’t let it remember passwords in mailman (I don’t know why). And of course, my admin password is LONG.
Opera’s case is pretty different: you aaalways have to click the Wand button in the toolbar…
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