I didn't know that "a modest proposal" was a phrase with satirical connotations. TIL. I simply meant that what I'm proposing is much less radical than many of t

I didn't know that "a modest proposal" was a phrase with satirical connotations. TIL. I simply meant that what I'm proposing is much less radical than many of the ideas I've seen floating around in the tech community lately. I use LastPass and it usually doesn't miss login forms, either. But sometimes it makes mistakes that need manual correction, like trying to log in via the signup page, or loading the home page when the login form is actually on a different page, or remembering the value of every checkbox on the login form (even those with style="display:none"). Some websites also use weird tricks like loading an HTTPS login form in an iframe injected by jQuery, etc. This post was written because I got frustrated with mistakes like that and I realized that there's only so much second-guessing that a third-party tool like LastPass can do. I don't let any software remember my bank passwords, so the issue of ridiculously convoluted logins didn't occur to me. Perhaps we could compile a public database of how certain websites (mis)behave, and tell browsers to handle such cases according to a script. But I guess we'll never be able to convince banks that automation like this prevents phishing better than the status quo does. I also didn't want to propose anything that would require any more than a couple of lines of code to be changed on the server side. Switching from HTML login forms to HTTP auth would require more than a couple of lines to be changed on the server side.