Guess the web browser game!
Your passwords are STILL showing in Firefox
This has been an issue for over 2 years, and it’s still an issue in Mozilla Firefox (even in Firefox 4 which was released to the general public yesterday). It’s a great browser, and I highly recommend it; Firefox has been a huge factor in the progress of web development.
One place that you still need to be careful using Firefox is “password management”. For those of you that don’t immediately know what password management is in Firefox, it’s the little “Remember Password” dialog that pops up when you log into most authenticated websites. It turns out that Firefox doesn’t mind showing you the password of which you’ve saved, in plain text (I’m being serious). This is default behavior, so if you haven’t spotted this, then chances are it applies to you right now. This means that someone could quite easily go onto your mac and read all your passwords by doing the following:
First of all open up “Preferences” in Firefox and head to the “Security” tab. Then click the Saved Passwords button as shown below:
This will bring up a Passwords window. Due to obvious reasons I’m not going to show you mine, but you need to look for this button at the bottom right of the window:
Press this button and voila! All your passwords are shown, in plain text, on-screen (N.B. I’ve removed my username + password from the screenshot below for security purposes). 
Right so that’s the issue, you might be wondering how to fix this. The way to change this is to set a master password for Firefox. Close that passwords window, and go back to the Security preferences pan. There you’ll see an option for “Use a master password”.
This means that Firefox protects all your saved passwords with a master password which is never shown. However, get used to seeing this prompt…
Because it comes up ALL the time when you’re using password-authenticated sites.
This has been part of Firefox since forever. Hopefully one day they’ll fix this issue, however for now, it’s still just a massive security hole.
How to completely disable Firefox caching
Web caching is great, there’s no doubt about it. Even in the days of 50Mb broadband, caching stuff still speeds things up no end. It’s also saved me (and my clients) a substantial amount of ££ in bandwidth costs.
At home, and work, I set up a caching proxy server with Squid, rendering my browser cache effectively useless. Here’s how to disable FireFox’s browser cache completely.
1. Fire up Firefox
2. Type about:config in your address bar
3. Type ‘cache’ in the search bar, and look for network.http.use-cache, and double click it to set it to false. Double clicking it again will set it to true and re-enable the cache
…and then you’re done.
To forcibly reload a page and all its dependencies, direct from source, ignoring local and proxy caches hold the shift key and hit reload. This applies not only to Firefox but also IE6/7 and Safari (maybe others too). I have a feeling this may be a ratified standard.
