Reactivating the My Oracle Support autocomplete

This post is an updated version of the original one here (in Brazilian Portuguese).

I'm a Siebel CRM certified professional and I use My Oracle Support some couple of times during a week.

That said, it would be required that I type my login and password every time that I want to go in the website. Well, that is not very fun because even if you want your browser will not remember those values.

I strong disagree with such website configuration: if I want to keep my credentials saved within the browser, that's my problem, not Oracle's. A simple "remember me" check box would be far more polite.

In the meantime, Oracle's website is still HTML with steroids at the end of your HTTP request. Even if they disable the browser login reminder it is still possible to enable it. And that's the trick I'm posting here.

The restriction applied by Oracle is an HTML tag called autocomplete. What it does is tell to the browser if it can or cannot save values from form fields and automatically fill them in again when you come back. If the autocomplete=off, the web browser will not even try to save those values for you.

Nowadays several browsers have tools to access the HTML of the HTTP response and enable the user to change it in memory. Mozilla Firefox, my preferable web browser, has such tools.

There are some bookmarklets that would, theoretically, change those configurations automatically, but the ones that I tried didn't work. But it is still possible to change them manually.

First, install the Firebug plug-in into Firefox.

Then, after restarting Firefox, go to the My Oracle Support website login page and click the "sign-in" button.

The login form will be shown to you (mine is in Brazilian Portuguese, but that doesn't matter). Open the Firebug (use the F12 keyboard shortcut if you can't find the related menu option). You will see something like the screen-shot below:

Just ignore that the form shown has a value for the login field.

In the lower window the Firebug plug-in will show you the source of the HTML. Press CTRL+F and type "autocomplete" as shown in the screen-shot and press the next button. The value of the property will be "off", disabling Firefox for trying to save the login and password.

After that, select the value of the property by left clicking on it: Firebug will offer to change this value. Go ahead and replace "off" with "on".

Now it is just a matter to type your login and password and access the My Oracle Support as you would do normally.

Testing time: logout and go back to the login page.

In the form, double click with the left button in the login field. Firefox will offer to you the login typed previously even though the form from My Oracle Support has the autocomplete=off again.

Finally, select the suggested login and Firefox will fill in both form fields for you. Yes, it is that simple.