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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

When you enter your password in a password field, the characters are obscured, making it harder to tell when you've made a typo.

So, if your password is "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall" and you accidentally type in "Humpty Dumpty sat on a ball" you would immediately realize your mistake, because the password's color signature would be different than what you're used to seeing.

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Of course, my preferred solution to this problem is to allow the user to toggle the password field, so that they can view the unobscured text if they wish.

That would require the user to be quite vigilante when they are entering a password on a website. Getting up to go to the bathroom could mean someone steals their password.

Getting up to go to the bathroom between typing in the password and hitting Enter?

What if you hit the back button until their browser goes back to the login page, likely with the form still filled out?

Tested Firefox and Chrome, they both clear the password field but leave the username. I'd be interested to hear if there is a browser that leaves the password field intact.

My comment is in response to the discussion about this:

"Of course, my preferred solution to this problem is to allow the user to toggle the password field, so that they can view the unobscured text if they wish"

I am assuming that if the password field is being toggled, that it is not actually a password field but rather a regular text field with some javascript stuff messing around to hide the text. That would probably function just like a username field. I'm not really a web developer though, so it is possible my analysis isn't correct.

I tested using the login form on huffduffer.com, which does exactly that.

Ah, fair enough. It seems you can make a password field display the password after all.

Someone could just use the dev tools to change the password field into an input field.

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