Firefox Password Fail

What happened with Firefox remembering passwords? Around the middle of July I suddenly noticed Firefox wasn't remembering passwords anymore. It still had them all in the saved passwords list (I think -- it doesn't anymore), and I still had it set to remember them, but it wouldn't auto-fill forms anymore and it didn't offer to remember new passwords. Oddly, this happened to both my home and work machines. My work machine runs Windows XP and Firefox 3, while my home machine runs Gentoo and Firefox 2, so it's fairly odd that both broke at the same time. I finally got around to searching for a fix today, and found a bunch of posts with the same problem:

• http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=762045


• http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=nl&forumId=1&comments_parentId=108743


• http://wccftech.com/forum/my-firefox-doesnt-remember-passwords-anymore-19358.html


• http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080524124947AADpbyu

All these people posted right around the same time, the middle of July. It seems Firefox simultaneously broke for a whole bunch of different people, and as far as I can tell nobody knows why; I'm not even sure if people have noticed the connection or not. The fix seems to be deleting the password cache so it can start over, but I haven't heard any explanation for what actually happened

Firefox 3

I'm told Firefox 3 just launched a few minutes ago. I'm not really sure if it did or not since its Mozilla's whole website is down hardcore, but I guess that's probably a good sign. World record FTW

EDIT: Hey, it works. Most of Mozilla.org is still down, but they must have done some sort of load balancing on just the Firefox download part, so that's working perfectly. I thought I'd post how to patch extensions to work with Firefox 3, as most of mine are apparently written by authors too lazy to do so themselves. Most places will tell you to use the nightly tester tools; this works too, I've used it before, but sadly Firefox's add-ons page is down so I can't download it at the moment. I've also seen instructions on how to patch the XPIs, but there's no need to do that if you already have them installed; this is how you manually patch add-ons that you already had on Firefox 2. Obviously these add-ons haven't been tested under Firefox 3 or their authors probably would've updated them, so there's a chance things will break when you do this:

1. Open your extensions folder. On Linux it's at ~/.mozilla/firefox/(your profile)/extensions; on Windows, C:\Documents and Settings\(your username)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\(your profile)\extensions


2. Each plugin is in it's own folder, named with a hexadecimal UUID. Open the first one and open it's resource descriptor, install.rdf. It's plain text, so any editor will do (read: use emacs)


3. Somewhere under em:targetApplication you'll find em:maxVersion. If it's 2. something, change it to 3.0.*


4. Repeat this procedure for every extension folder


5. Move all the folders you changed (or all of them, it doesn't matter) to some temporary location


6. Restart Firefox; your add-on list should be empty now


7. Move all the folders back to your extensions folder


8. Restart Firefox again; the add-on window should automatically open to alert you it has detected new extensions. All your extensions should be listed as before, but enabled now

Screenshot from an XP machine:

Microsoft: Standards are for lesser companies

The W3C has been working on a draft for supporting safe XSS requests. It's currently a working draft, so they're encouraging comments and criticism on the design; that's the whole idea behind publishing the working draft. Firefox 3 implements the draft as it currently exists. While I think implementing drafts is a somewhat bad idea, Firefox 3 is in beta, and Firefox's automatic update mechanism means they can make any changes that come up in the draft.

Did Microsoft implement the draft? Or, even better, did they just wait? Or, God forbid, did they take their ideas and contribute them to the W3C draft? Hell no they didn't, waiting and contributing to the community is for "the other guys". They implemented their own mechanism. How very precedented, Microsoft. They just couldn't fucking help themselves, they had to do it. So once the W3C draft is finalized, everyone else will implement it, IE will have its own way, and web developers will have to write functions that use both methods. Soon fun libraries will come out that handle all the browser differences for us so we don't need to bother. Libraries that needn't have ever existed at all. Pledge to conform to web standards indeed.

This question occurred to me once, and I still don't have the answer, so if somebody does comment or something. Why does Microsoft still make Internet Explorer? They don't make money from it, they were forced to start distributing it for free ages ago. They get in trouble for antitrust stuff because of it all the time. Every web developer alive hates them because of IE. They'll probably never get it right. What's the point? Why not just distribute Firefox or some other browser instead, and stop making a custom browser?