GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 347586
username auto completion
Last modified: 2010-06-04 20:02:10 UTC
+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #149694 +++ Users are more habituted for movement between Username and password fields by hitting the <TAB> key. The gdm login screen does not allow the TAB key as a request for movement between fields. Cloned bug# 149694 to highlight a usability issue with the current implementation of tab character in gdm. Users are habituated to having tab expand to complete commands/filenames in bash & other shells providing auto-completion. Example: I typed part of my username & pressed tab. I was navigated to the password entry field. However gdm hadn't auto-completed my username & hence didn't accept my login with correct password. The resolution of bug# 149694 is that navigating from name to password field on tab is not a good idea whereas gives current beahviour is as per resolution of bug# 300850. On the other hand, what is the proportion of users who use the shell often enough for this to become a usbility issue? My experience is that even shell newbies use the tab auto-completion feature quite often. More feedback/analysis is required.
We could have an implementation where tab pressed on username entry that does two things : 1) Auto-complete the username. 2) Navigate to password field as it does now.
auto-complete username is not recommended. Any feature that makes it possible to identify users on the system impacts security negatively. If enough people really felt this sort of feature was useful, a patch to make GDM behave this way would be okay as long as the feature was non-default and "auto-completion" had to be turned on in the configuration to make it work this way.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 414862 ***
Sorry, marked this as a duplicate, but it isn't really - so I reopened it. However the other bug is related so I'd look at it. Might make sense to fix both issues together.
Note bug #590100. Not exactly a duplicate, but perhaps these issues should be fixed together.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, you are using a version that is too old and not supported anymore. GNOME developers are no longer working on that version, so unfortunately there will not be any bug fixes for the version that you use. By upgrading to a newer version of GNOME you could receive bug fixes and new functionality. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain a newer version of GNOME. Please feel free to reopen this bug if the problem still occurs with a newer version of GNOME.