Password field?

You know, the HTML form field that is on almost all the login/signup web forms where you enter your password but you only see some stars instead of characters.

… dead?

Well, yes. I mean, does it still serve its purpose? The purpose of hiding what you type from … err … hmmm … people behind you? While I don’t argue its original purpose, I do argue its purpose in the current times. Initially, there weren’t that many people with computers at home and not all of those that had one at home, also had an Internet connection. Internet cafes were popular and you were standing next to other people or had people walking behind you, therefore when typing passwords it was important to not having to police around first.

However, things have changed and almost everybody has now a computer with an Internet connection at home, so the only people that can steal your password are your kids and your wife … and perhaps your dog if he’s that smart. Even if you access the Internet in public locations, if you feel that someone is breathing down your neck, just turn around and ask for some space. Conclusion? Password field has become useless.

A web developer rant

From a web developer point of view, usually in a sign up form, when you have a password field, you have to put another field called “Re-type your password” or something similar. Why? Because the user doesn’t see what he or she just typed (can only see a bunch of stars) and by asking to type again the password you are trying to make sure that no mistakes have been made (it’s very unlikely that the user does the same mistakes two times in a row)

So, you need to add another field AND do a validation by comparing the two values AND generate the appropriate error message if they don’t match. For what?