[Bugmenot] Bugmenot: feedback from logicnazi

[notes at mozdev.org]

http://bugmenot.mozdev.org/notes.html#c65

Ideas on populating fields.  Well it seems a bunch of other people had the same idea that I did and while I realize that there might be some problems this doesn't seem like a reason not to do it.  Sure sites might try to block but this sort of reasoning would have averted this entire project.  While you are right this might confuse some users if people block only this method you could use a seperate database for a beta version of the autofill feature so normal users never even deal with this and the confusion could be evaluated.  Also I don't think sites *could* circumvent this without also breaking the form information browsers store and driving away readers.

I think the best bet would be to give bugmenot a general ability to fill in web page forms.  Click a context menu button and it would fill every form option on the page by reading from database.  The natural idea that springs to mind is somehow using the form interface in mozilla (or whatever) though I believe the response above was saying this was difficult as it is some encrypted database. However, I think there is an easy workaround.

In this new setup when you select add login from context menu it would send the entire HTML page (no images or anything) and form selections (in whatever the native browser format happens to be) in to the server.  The server saves this info and when a request is made for that login page it sends exactly this info to the client.  Since we have a web page and form entries *already* in the internal browser format all we need to do is call whatever browser function learns form entries and saves them in the db on this page from bugmenot and then call the function to populate the form in the window from the database.  It has the potential advantage of not being able to share databases between browsers but if the user base is large enough this shouldn't be much of an issue and it has the *definitive* advantage that it can't be circumvented without circumventing the browsers form storage itself (after the browser recieves and processes the page from bugmenot it is in *exactly* the s!
 ame state as a browser who had entered these values and then remembered them).

If this is doesn't work for some reason another good way to do this is the following.  In the online database save both the logins/passwords but also what form entry they should be entered in.  The browser extension could add sites by having the user right click on every filled in field and selecting add to bugmenot.  When this is done the browser extension would send a session id (so we know what goes with what) the webpage and form being filled out and the entry.  To login to a site we would simply call up this data from bugmenot, search for the form fields and fill them in appropriatly. This too would let people use this on sites more complicated than a simple login/password.  

In both cases I don't see the issue with multiple logins.  Just as now you could have an option 'login broken' which would fetch an entierly new set of data.  I realize that either of these projects is somewhat ambitious as it requires some special server code (although for a cheap hack we could have the data just uploaded as one file and all the server does is figure out which webpage you are looking at and send back a data bundle for this webpage) and certainly something more complex on the plugin end.  But it would make bugmenot much more usefull and address wider purposes.  For instance a company might run their own version of a bugmenot server to give employees access to paid databases easily.  

I would be quite happy to help such a project.  I'm not familiar with plugin coding or the mozilla API so if someone could point me in the right direction so I can figure out it this is plausible I would appreciate this (i.e. a link the the appropriate part of the mozilla API).  Also I can be contacted at logicnazi at gmail.com  Are their development mailing lists or forums somewhere?

In response to the person who doesn't see the option in the contextmenu make sure you quit your browser and exit quick launch then start again.  Right click on the page and (at least on mozilla prob similar on firefox) it is right under stop (5th option down).

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