Never forget another password again

During the course of a year, you’ll probably visit hundreds of web sites that ask you to log on with a user name and password. You might need credentials to access accounts at online stores or banks, to use web-based services such as photosharing sites, or to manage a web site or blog.

Keeping track of those passwords can be a hassle, especially if you maintain unique, hard-to-guess ones for each site. AutoComplete provides a convenient, reasonably secure way of caching these credentials so that they’re available when you revisit a web site. Here’s how the process works.

The first time you visit a site that includes a log-on form, you enter your user name and password and click the button that submits the credentials you entered to the site. Before processing the form, Internet Explorer displays a dialogue box asking if you want to save the password.

If you click Yes, your user name and password are encrypted, using your Windows log-on credential and the web site address as keys, and stored as binary data in a secure location within the registry (HKCU\Software\Microsoft\ Internet Explorer\IntelliForms\Storage2). The key name consists of a long string of characters that identifies the page URL; the key’s data contains the encrypted credentials.

If you click No, Windows records an entry in the same secure location in the registry as if you had clicked Yes, but the data field contains no user name or password, only instructions to ignore this site’s log-on form in the future.

The next time you open the page containing the log-on form, Windows checks the registry to see if that URL is listed. If it is, and it contains a saved user name/password combination, then the drop-down AutoComplete list appears as soon as you begin typing in the user name box, displaying saved entries that match your input. (Alternatively, you can double-click in the name box to display all saved user names.) If Windows finds the URL in the list with a notation that you previously clicked No when asked if you wanted to save your password, it waits for you to enter the credentials and doesn’t prompt you again.

Not everyone welcomes this kind of assistance, though. Depending on your preferences and level of caution, you might choose to use all or just some of the browser’s AutoComplete services (or you may not want to use them at all).

To enable or disable AutoComplete options that affect forms and password prompts, click Tools > Internet Options > Content > AutoComplete. This dialogue box provides control over all but one of the options. (The other option, called Inline AutoComplete, appears in a different box.) Here you can select any or all of the check boxes:

• Web Addresses to enable autocompletion of typing in the Address bar
• Forms to enable auto-completion of data that you type into web pages, such as the names and shipping addresses that you supply on e-commerce sites.
• User Names And Passwords On Forms to remember log-on credentials for various sites that you visit.

You can delete individual snippets of saved form data and saved web log-on credentials from the AutoComplete list if you can reach the page associated with that data. (If the page no longer exists, credentials remain saved but can’t be accessed.) This capability is especially useful if you make occasional typing errors and fill various AutoComplete lists with misspelled entries.

To delete a single saved value, go to the web page associated with the saved data. Click in the box that contains the form field or log-on name and press the Down Arrow key to select the stored item (you may need to press this key repeatedly if you have a number of items stored for that field). When you’ve selected the data you want to get rid of, press the Delete key. If you select a logon name that’s associated with a password, Windows displays a dialogue box asking if you want to also delete the stored password.

Cleaning up

For more thorough housecleaning, you can wipe out all saved username/ password pairs and start from scratch. Click Clear Forms or Clear Passwords in the AutoComplete Settings dialogue box. Each of these buttons deletes a particular category of entries. As the text below the buttons indicates, to clear web address entries you have to go elsewhere – to the General tab of the Internet Options dialogue box. Clicking Clear History there covers your tracks on the History Explorer bar in addition to clearing AutoComplete entries.

Keep track of your passwords