Great discovery: New Opera feature to auto fill in personal information – look out for the yellow borders around forms

For a while I see the yellow borders with form fields in Opera, just like the yellow wand forms. And I had no idea what they are good for. After some research I found following hint on Opera's help pages:

If Opera recognizes a form field as one you have entered information for in the Wand preferences, you can also use the Wand to fill in the field. Click the Wand button or press Ctrl+Enter.

Just go to Tools-Preferences (or CTRL+12) -Wand and fill out the fields for personal information (First name, Last Name, Homepage, City etc). As soon as there are corresponding fields on a web-page they are highlighted with yellow borders (just like the wand login) and all of those fields are filled out at once just by a click on the Wand button or CTRL+Enter.

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Further thoughts

Fast-forward doesn't work what is different to Wand logins.

I assume there may be options (now or in future) to have the names of Opera's personal information fields connected to more than the exact match of the form name on the webpages (similar to the way you can define the behavior of Fast-forward in fast-forward.ini).

It is not mentioned in Opera's changelogs, but as it doesn't work in Opera8.54 it had to be introduced in some Opera9 release. I miss some more information for the users and I was just kind of confused about the new yellow bordered forms (well, not too much as it is unobtrusive and easy to ignore). Maybe the discovery would have been easier if I didn't remove the Wand button from my toolbar.

My first idea about the meaning

I made a similar proposal in an email conversation with Hallvord R. M. Steen when I reported the Wand login is working on a phishing site (not a real security issue because the phishing page loads the genuine page in a frame and the login data are sent to the correct server). As the user may perceive the site as genuine because the Wand is working there is a risk of the user interacting with content in frames belonging to the attacker.

As Opera could hardly determine whether forms from and to login.bank-url.com are o.k. on a top frame from bank-url.com but not on a top frame from bad-site.com I suggested some unobtrusive user information – some additional text with the Wand login or some different coloring of the form field itself. Hallvord passed my ideas to the Opera UI people.

While I didn't realize any change for Wand forms (maybe I haven't been on an according login page since the time I examined the pishing site) there are a lot of forms with yellow borders on pages with forms on not login pages and I thought it could be a good idea to know when some content is delivered to a different URL but what is visible in the address bar – not only for Wand login data.

Well, this was not the reason, but now I know about just another great Opera feature 🙂