Don’t stop password masking; let the user decide
‘Show password’ is a small and simple Jquery plugin that let your users decide whether they want their password fields masked or not.
Jacob Nielsen’s blog post ‘Stop password masking’ stirred up quite the discussion and divided the web developers into three camps; Stop masking, Don’t stop masking and Do both!.
I’m definitely in favor of ‘Do both!’ and letting the user decide whether she wants her passwords masked or not. It is very simple to do and it’s fairly common concept; just look at the screen-shot of the Networks Preferences in Mac OS X above. The same thing can also be found in Microsoft Windows.
The demo in the Iframe above uses the very simple and lightweight Jquery plugin called ‘Show password’. You can get it from the ‘Show password’-project page.
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I agree on the above. You should never decide to not mask passwords for a user. How often do people login into their social network accounts in internetcafe’s and don’t want the risk of anyone looking over their shoulders. Nice little plugin, great job!
Nice! Hate typing password twice to register at some site, only to figure out later that I had Caps Lock on :-)
This little script can help to get rid of those “Type your password again, because you could make a typo while entering it the first time and have no way of finding it out” fields :)