At the risk of belaboring the point, I offer a few simple and obvious suggestions to address the issues raised here. I suspect I speak for most others who’ve commented here as well as thousands with the same thoughts who haven’t bothered to comment.
- Allow copying and pasting of passwords. It’s one thing to manually enter a password if the password is “xyzzy”; it’s another if it’s a long string of random characters. And even if it’s a long pass phrase, recognize that most people have hundreds of online accounts, and remembering a different pass phrase for each account is nearly impossible. So for those who properly secure their accounts, there’s little practical alternative to using some sort of password manager and copy and paste.
- If the document to be imported requires that there be no spaces in the password, remove them automatically; any decent high school coder could do this. Absent this, copying and pasting would require pasting into something like a text editor, removing the spaces, and copying and pasting that. This is simply nuts. As Kernighan and Plauger urged long ago, let the machine do the dirty work.
- Allow making the password visible, preferably having one click keep the password visible for the duration of the entry. With a long password, an “enter and check” approach is little better than not allowing the password to be viewed at all. It probably makes sense to hide the password by default to protect those who bring their laptop to a crowded public library to do their taxes, but there’s little sense in hiding the password from more sensible folks who do their taxes in private.
