HOWTO remove form field completion values in Firefox
By default, Firefox will remember what you type in form fields, and will offer auto-completion of the field the next time you are faced with the same form field. In general, this is useful, but sometimes you may not want an entry remembered. Using the ‘Clear Private Settings’ option in the Preference Dialog you can clear all save form values, but what if you only want to remove one value?
As an example, I just logged into GMail a few minutes ago. On my first attempt, I fat-fingered something and ended up typing my password into the user name field, and pressing Enter. At this point both my username (from prior logins) and my password were cached by Firefox. A malicious user who obtained access to my computer could visit the GMail log-in page, and simply press [down arrow] in the user name field to see both my username and password. I could clear all saved form fields, but I’d rather just remove the password from that field’s saved values.
In IE for Windows, after using [down arrow] to select an item from the drop-down list of remembered values, you can press Delete to remove the item from the list of stored values. This doesn’t work in Firefox; however, a little experimenting revealed that shift-Delete provides the same function in Firefox (2.0.0.4 for OS X). I’ll test this on Firefox for Windows tomorrow at work, and update this post.
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Well, how amazing that I should search for this only a day after you posted it (having made exactly the same error), and hey presto! It works.
Thank you very much.
Here’s what you do:
Thanks! This worked perfectly.
mucho mucho gracias. same as simon’s - i made the same error and googled for relief, found your weblog and presto! many many thanks
Thank you for this gem of a hint! I have wanted to do this for a long time; it works like a charm on Firefox 2 under linux.
Best regards.