Master web forms with Autofill Forms

Sebastian Tchan, developer of Secure Login, a powerful yet simple Firefox extension I reviewed a couple of months ago and has rapidly become as must have, has released a new extension dubbed Autofill Forms, which appears to be the most powerful form filler available.

You start entering values for some common fields AF comes with. Then, when you get to a web form as extensive as eBay’s registration form, just press the autofill button in the toolbar and Autofill Forms will try to match each form field’s name to one in the current profile. If found, it autofills the entered value.

So far it may sound similar to many other extension and products available. What sets AF apart is the use of regular expressions for identifying fields. So for example not only a field named firstname will be matched to your first name but also first_name, first-name, name-first, name_first, namefirst, etc. all based on a single rule.

The inclusion of a rule editor sets AF another big mile apart: you can define rules with multiple contains, begins with, ends with and equals criteria, which are store using a special syntax. THis eases the path for defining rules for other languages.

As mentioned, if you use several addresses, phone numbers and email addresses depending on whether the form is for personal, work or other matter you can define several profiles and select them from the same autofill button once you add it through View/Toolbars/Customize….

If you have tried autofillers in the past you will soon learn they are not perfect as some particular field names can’t be identified properly. AF helps here as well. A button in AF’s settings window reveals all form field names next to each so you can decide whether it’s worth defining a new rule for its name.

You can also configure Autofill Forms to save all entered information encrypted.

The only feature I miss is FireForm’s profile export/import capabilities, which in AF case could be extended to rules export/import to easily recreate them if something goes wrong or I want to share them with a friend.

A powerful autofill extension that you my want to try. Available at Mozilla Add-ons.

Features: 5/5 – Usefulness: 4/5 – Usability: 5/5