Page 1 of 1

Credentials disappearing - intended feature?

Posted: 2018-10-23, 23:34
by Lew Rockwell Fan
At fairly long intervals (I haven't kept records) my username/login credentials quit showing up as a dropdown when I click inside the appropriate fields. Then I have to consult my records and fill them in by hand. The first few times I just shrugged it off and it doesn't happen often so I don't recall the details of the previous times, but this time, it didn't just zap the credentials for one website, but all I've checked.

Is this a deliberate design feature and, if so, can I turn it off or lengthen the interval to a century? Or have I broken something?

PM runs away RAM fairly often. I use the memory restart extension which usually manages to catch it, but not always. When it doesn't sometimes I can xkill it, but occasionally I have to press the shutdown button. This happened recently, with conky showing my RAM at 97 before it quit updating as the system froze. I was able to get it to respond to the shutdown button without having to actually kill power. Could that have caused this?

Re: Credentials disappearing - intended feature?

Posted: 2018-10-26, 14:47
by bgstack15
Have you checked to make sure you're still using the profile you intend to? The "about:support" meta-page will show you what profile directory you're using. Perhaps the profile is just a different directory for whatever reason. Additionally, inside the profile directory, perhaps one of the various files is broken? I don't know which one stores the saved credentials. Probably one of the sqlite files.

And of course, have you confirmed the "Remember passwords for sites" option is checked in Tools menu --> Preferences --> Security tab?

Re: Credentials disappearing - intended feature?

Posted: 2018-10-26, 15:20
by Lucio Chiappetti
or "automatically fill login details" (ibidem)

Re: Credentials disappearing - intended feature?

Posted: 2018-10-26, 19:38
by Walter Dnes
I noticed this change in Pale Moon too. But... once I type in the first character of my userID in the logon screen, it works as before.

Re: Credentials disappearing - intended feature?

Posted: 2018-10-30, 06:11
by Lew Rockwell Fan
Thanks, gentlesapients.
bgstack15 wrote:Have you checked to make sure you're still using the profile you intend to?
I always start with an explicit profile option, so yes.
Walter Dnes wrote:I noticed this change in Pale Moon too. But... once I type in the first character of my userID in the logon screen, it works as before.
That's the normal behavior. That changed a while ago for security reasons. That's what I EXPECT to happen, and what DOES happen for weeks. And then suddenly palemoon forgets all my credentials.

So, sounds like it's not a feature or a setting. Guess I'll blame it on cosmic rays. Or Russians. Yeah, that's it, Russians did it. OK, I can live with it. Thanks.

Re: Credentials disappearing - intended feature?

Posted: 2018-11-13, 17:00
by Lew Rockwell Fan
Still getting this behavior. Just happened again. All credentials disappeared together. It's really beginning to bug me.

privacy.clearOnShutdown.passwords is false.

I'm not using a master password, so, if I understand correctly
security.password_lifetime 30
is irrelevant, right?

Any suggestions on how to track this down? Is there a log I should check & something I should grep for? How about backing up the files where credentials are stored every time I enter a new one? Which file would that be?

Re: Credentials disappearing - intended feature?

Posted: 2018-12-02, 16:45
by Lew Rockwell Fan
It happened again. In the meantime, I formed a new hypothesis - maybe it hasn't quit working - maybe it has just radically slowed down. I think that's it. I got the same behavior, but I just left a few tabs open where it was happening. After several minutes it started working again. So perhaps this is related to the more general problem of PM bogging down for no apparent reason. But conky was not reporting a high RAM usage. I have noticed that conky and the "free" command don't agree on how much RAM I'm using. I didn't notice any other degradation of performance at the time. Hmmm. My PM profiles are accessed through symlinks & stored in a crypt on a dedicated partition. Possibly the decryption/encryption is slowing down. I'll think about ways to test that. Next time I'll notice the cpu usage. There is probably some way to monitor performance of a virtual "drive".

Re: Credentials disappearing - intended feature?

Posted: 2018-12-14, 20:02
by cosmo666
This problem has occurred off-and-on since I made Pale Moon my primary browser, but most of the time it happens when trying to login to one of my on-line banking accounts. Banks tend to stress the situation by adopting non-standard approaches to confirming an ID/password. For example, USBANK asks for the login ID on one page, then asks for the password on a second, and subsequent page. However, once I enabled "Automatically fill-in login details", the credentials (which Pale Moon had accurately stored) were properly applied in sequence.

Re: Credentials disappearing - intended feature?

Posted: 2019-05-05, 21:04
by Lew Rockwell Fan
Not the issue here. I never got around to testing methodically, but I'd bet it was the encrypted fs where the credentials were stored slowing down, because I"m not using that setup ATM and I haven't seen this lately. Either that, or it's the Russian bots. Maybe after they got through helping Moore they were bored and decided to keep in practice by harassing me.