[kde-guidelines] [KDE Usability] Password Field

[Björn Balazs]

Am Freitag, 6. Dezember 2013, 22:44:17 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> El Divendres, 6 de desembre de 2013, a les 13:12:21, Björn Balazs va 
escriure:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > working with Jan on the Networkmanager, I stumbled over a problem we face
> > in many areas:
> > 
> > Entering Passwords
> > 
> > The problem I want to address is about the visibility of the password. To
> > avoid errors, it would be cool to see the password, but if I am in an
> > public environment, this might be not such a good idea.
> > 
> > Hence the visibility depends rather on my environment, than on the actual
> > password I have to enter.
> > 
> > I think this is something we should solve centrally. I think of something
> > like:
> > 
> > Password: [____________][VIS]
> > 
> > So there should be toggle button [VIS] directly attached to the password
> > field that toggles the visibility. I could imagine that its state could be
> > stored centrally, so when I have to enter the next Password, visibility is
> > like it was the last time.
> 
> You say that "the visibility depends more on the environment than on the
> password" so I do not understand why you want to store the visibility since
> it's very possible that my environtment has changed. I think we should
> always default to "hiding" the password in a password field.

I assume that the environment does not change that often. When I work in a 
train (and hence want to hide passwords) I do this for quite some time. So I 
thought I might be a good idea to keep the last state. Also there is not a lot 
of potential harm, as you immediately see whether the password is shown or not 
- so you can toggle the mode to the desired state.

The idea is to be convenient - which most of the time somehow interferes with 
security. 

What do others think?

Cheers,
Björn

> Cheers,
>   Albert
> 
> > Perhaps we could even bind it to some environmental variables, like: Power
> > not attached? -> Hide Password.
> > 
> > Side note: There are some solutions, that display the last entered digit
> > for a short time, so a toggle solution might be not sufficient - or we
> > need a 3 state toggle something...
> > 
> > What do you think?
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Björn
> > 
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