How can I get browser to prompt to save password?

Question

Hey, I'm working on a web app that has a login dialog that works like this:

1. User clicks "login"
2. Login form HTML is loaded with AJAX and displayed in DIV on page
3. User enters user/pass in fields and clicks submit. It's NOT a <form> -- user/pass are submitted via AJAX
4. If user/pass are okay, page reloads with user logged in.
5. If user/pass are bad, page does NOT reload but error message appears in DIV and user gets to try again.

Here's the problem: the browser never offers the usual "Save this password? Yes / Never / Not Now" prompt that it does for other sites.

I tried wrapping the <div> in <form> tags with "autocomplete='on'" but that made no difference.

Is it possible to get the browser to offer to store the password without a major rework of my login flow?

thanks Eric

p.s. to add to my question, I'm definitely working with browers that store passwords, and I've never clicked "never for this site" ...this is a technical issue with the browser not detecting that it's a login form, not operator error :-)

Answer 1

Your site is probably already in the list where the browser is told not to prompt for saving a password. In firefox, Options -> Security -> Remember password for sites[check box] - exceptions[button]

Answer 2

The browser might not be able to detect that your form is a login form. According to some of the discussion in this previous question, a browser looks for form fields that look like <input type="password">. Is your password form field implemented similar to that?

Edit: To answer your questions below, I think Firefox detects passwords by form.elements[n].type == "password" (iterating through all form elements) and then detects the username field by searching backwards through form elements for the text field immediately before the password field (more info here). From what I can tell, your login form needs to be part of a <form> or Firefox won't detect it.

Answer 3

Not every browser (e.g. IE 6) has options to remember credentials.

One thing you can do is to (once the user successfully logs in) store the user information via cookie and have a "Remember Me on this machine" option. That way, when the user comes again (even if he's logged off), your web application can retrieve the cookie and get the user information (user ID + Session ID) and allow him/her to carry on working.

Hope this can be suggestive. :-)

Answer 4

Using a cookie would probably be the best way to do this.

You could have a checkbox for 'Remember me?' and have the form create a cookie to store the //user's login// info. EDIT: User Session Information

To create a cookie, you'll need to process the login form with PHP.

Answer 5

The truth is, you can't force the browser to ask. I'm sure the browser has it's own algorithm for guessing if you've entered a username/password, such as looking for an input of type="password" but you cannot set anything to force the browser.

You could, as others suggest, add user information in a cookie. If you do this, you better encrypt it at the least and do not store their password. Perhaps store their username at most.