Form elements that have the autocomplete attribute with attribute value of "off" do not store the field value as per the website author's wishes. We should give users the option to override website author's decisions. For now it would be OK if we did this through an about:config flag, and bug 752719 can deal with figuring out if it belongs in our Preferences UI or not. To fix this bug: 1) We need to add a pref to /browser/app/profile/firefox.js which should default to 'false'. The pref can be called "signon.forceEnableAutocomplete". 2) At /toolkit/components/passwordmgr/nsLoginManager.js#805 we should check the pref and return false if the preference is set to true. 3) We should also add a test for this change.

Do you know the whole history of this including that we had already an option to ignore autocomplete=off in Mozilla/Seamonkey but porting this over to toolkit was marked wontfix (bug 245333) ?

I would like to work on this. Is this still a confirmed bug?

Jared, when did we decide this is something we actually want to start doing? AFAIK it isn't but I may have missed some discussion.

Yeah, this isn't the route we want to go... Use of |autocomplete=off| is useful / recommended in a number of cases. The classic example is an admin's form for changing a user's password -- the admin won't want to save that password. The desired UX for this is twofold: (Not sure what the bug numbers are for this offhand) 1) When submitting a form with autocomplete=off, add an icon-only notification (ie, a doorhanger without the prompt initially shown). Clicking it brings back the standard save-login doorhanger. 2) When loading a form with autocomplete=off (or with form autofill disabled in the browser), add a icon-only doorhanger. Clicking it brings up a (new) doorhanger for the user to fill in a known login on the page. This UI is also wanted so one can disable autofill, but still fill in page logins.