Scenario: as your webmail login interface is loading, you’ve already selected your username—thanks to Firefox’s form autocompletion—but at the instant you tab over to the password field, the page finishes loading, some javascript onload event fires, and the page focuses the caret back in the username field.

Of course you’re not even looking at the screen because you do this so often, and before you realize it, you’ve hit enter and sent your username and your password together in the username field, which Firefox has just cached for all of eternity. Now the next time you go log in, Firefox’s autocompletion options exposes your password. Argh!

Solution: This shouldn’t be a big deal to fix, except the only UI option for clearing out a saved form value (that I can determine) is by going to Tools > Options > Privacy > Saved Form Information and selecting “Clear”. So it appeared to be an all or nothing proposition.

Well at least until I talked with Asa Dotzler at FOO Camp on Sunday. After a really nice long conversation, I thought to ask about why I couldn’t selectively remove saved form values and he said:

“Sure you can, it’s Shift+Delete.”

And sure enough it works like a charm. Thanks Asa.