Hello all, i have read the following discussion on login autofill being disabled by default: Saving passwords in Tor? - #5
I am using Tor browser as a user bypassing some illegal censorship in my country (basically to access Rumble) and that discussion is quite cryptic to me, mentioning the Tor policy, “Disk Avoidance”, “disk history records”,… and this article:
« Auto form-fill
We disable the password saving functionality in the browser as part of our Disk Avoidance requirement. However, since users may decide to re-enable disk history records and password saving, we also set the signon.autofillForms preference to false to prevent saved values from immediately populating fields upon page load. Since JavaScript can read these values as soon as they appear, setting this preference prevents automatic linkability from stored passwords. »
If i understand correctly there must be a way to re-enable autofill for logins, so could you please tell me how to do that ? Also, the feature of creating a new login being grayed out by default, but still apparent, without any indication, is extremely awkward and i know that many users have been very frustrated by that. Especially because when one searches on Google for instance, one finds no explanation. And after searching for a while i cannot even see how to try to change “the signon.autofillForms preference” for instance. But i have no idea if that would be sufficient and suspect it would not.
I really can’t get why make things this way. Like 10 months ago when i used Tor i could save passwords, and i reinstalled it a couple of months after and find this buggy behavior. I hope you can realize a little what the experience of a normal nonexpert user is. Thank you in advance.
I am not a security expert so take that into account if you adopt these settings; probably it is safer to make use of an external password minder instead.
Steps to enable Saved Logins:
go into Settings >> Privacy & Security >> Logins and passwords:
enable “Ask to save logins and passwords for websites”
enable “Use a Primary Password” and enter a strong password
under … >> History uncheck “Always use private browsing mode”
under … >> Security select “Safer”
Restart browser and try logging into this forum; you should be prompted to save your login credentials then asked to enter your Primary Password if you click [Save]. Future visits will prompt for the Primary password then display a menu of saved logins on the Login page.
Incidentally if you go into the about:config settings you should still see “signon.autofillForms” set to “false” ; login credentials are not auto-filled, only a menu of saved logins is offered.
Thank you very much meta4, however i cannot set a primary password, even with the maximum grade for security -displayed when choosing the password in the form of a blue bar. I get the following error message. I suspect that it is something that is disabled but still left for users to try in vain to activate during a couple of hours. But i’d be very happy if im wrong. Does it really work for you with the last version of Tor -i’ve just redownloaded and reinstalled it, on the last version of MacOS.
After insisting a little it worked. I went to the about:config page and changed signon.autofillForms.http to true. The default value for signon.autofillForms is true too on my Tor Browser: 12.0.7 for MacOS, but it does not allow saving logins before following the above steps.
So now it seems everything is working as hoped. I am sure that this will help other users, those who don’t care much about privacy in browsing but just want to bypass illegal censorship. Thank you again meta4.
