This is really nice: trunk builds of Firefox 3 since 1 Sept 2007 have a smarter Password Manager that asks you whether you want to save your passwords in a non-modal way. (The relevant enhancement ticket is replace modal pre-submit save password dialog with post-submit bar for those of you who want to read the bug report.)

Anyway, in simpler words (and some screenshots to follow), what this means is that whenever you login to a site that requires your password, Firefox will no longer wait for you to tell it whether it should remember your password. I bet this looks familiar:

Its usability is lacking because of 2 things:

• if I entered the wrong password told Firefox to remember my password, I’d have to go to the Password Manager to delete it, and
• Firefox doesn’t submit your login until you tell it what to do with your password, annoying for 2 reasons:
  1. Sometimes I’m not sure if I entered the right password – but I’d be pretty sure of that if I get to the next page (i.e. if my login request was submitted).
  2. It’s just plain faster if Firefox submitted the login and asked about my password together/later – blocking the submit is just a waste of time (i.e. a non-modal dialog would make more sense).

So, especially since I’ve used used Firefox for 156 hours at work since a month and a half ago (my most used application apparently), it’s pretty cool to find out that Firefox 3 will come with a non-modal “Remember my password” dialog. Here’s what it looks like:

The dialog appears on top right after Firefox submits the login form. One more thing to look forward to in Firefox 3!