There are a few methods to get around autocomplete=off in a website’s forms.  One is to permanently disable the feature in firefox that checks for this tag.

Permanently disable the feature in FF

- Navigate to the “components” folder in the firefox installation directory (default for windows: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\).
- Open “nsLoginManager.js” in notepad or some other simple text editor.
- Find the function “_isAutoCompleteDisabled”, and comment the lines out by adding two forward slashes before each line (see below).

/*
* _isAutoCompleteDisabled
*
* Returns true if the page requests autocomplete be disabled for the
* specified form input.
*/
_isAutocompleteDisabled :  function (element) {
//        if (element && element.hasAttribute(“autocomplete”) &&
//            element.getAttribute(“autocomplete”).toLowerCase() == “off”)
//            return true;

return false;
},

- Save and close the file, and restart firefox.

Javascript Method

The second method is to use a ‘bookmarklet’ that  runs some javascript that does this for you.  There a many of these available, but here is an example:

javascript:void((function(){var%20a,b,c,d;b=a=c=0;(function(e){var%20f,g,h,i,j;for(f=0;f<e.length;f++){try{arguments.callee(e.frames[f]);}catch(k){}}g=e.document.forms;for(h=0;h<g.length;h++){i=g[h];c++;if(i.attributes["autocomplete"]){i.attributes["autocomplete"].value=”on”;b++;}for(j=0;j<i.length;j++){d=i[j];if(d.attributes["autocomplete"]){d.attributes["autocomplete"].value=”on”;a++;}}}})(top);alert(“Removed%20autocomplete%20prevention%5Cnfrom%20″+b+”%20forms,%20″+a+”%20form%20elements%5Cnout%20of%20″+c+”%20possible%20forms.”);})())

{Credit ostermiller.org for javascript function}

You can either copy and paste this in your URL bar, or save the script as a bookmark.  When you come upon a site that you can’t save a password for, use the code above, then login as normal, and you should see the option to save the password.

This was tested in Firefox 3.0.10, and worked great.