Chrome extension is too slow/heavy to prompt to save new credentials

meletis

Hi all,

I'm the lead developer of SurveyCTO and we have just verified that the Chrome extension becomes very slow and make our web page totally unresponsive at some cases. I will explain what I mean with "some cases".

Our software is a SaaS and it contains (among others) an administration console where authorized users are allowed to create new user accounts. In those forms, the admins create new passwords for the new accounts. Once they hit the submit button to register the new user, the Password1 extension in Chrome is offering to save that login information. Ideally we would like to disable that functionality but we understand that this is not possible from our side, as also explained in https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/54532/disable-password-prompt-for-form.

However, our administrator console can contain many things and in fact we have clients that have created many elements in that console (like users and other things), and that makes the console a bit heavier than when it is empty.

In "such cases", what may happen once an administrator tries to create a new user, is that the page becomes totally frozen and unresponsive once the "Add user" button is hit in the attached screenshot.

Then, once the page becomes responsive again, after 20-30 seconds (!), then the user is prompted to save the new credentials:

Even if he/she disables the prompt for this site, the initial freezing is not gone, it is ALWAYS happening. The only difference is that the popup is not shown, but it looks like the extension is still working nevertheless behind the scenes.

We have this theory that the size of the DOM matters, even if the size in general doesn't matter :) . It matters for this extension because it is super fast with our login page. We also believe that the extension is analyzing the DOM so that it can come up with a name, a "title", so that it can offer this name to the user. In our case, it came up with "SurveyCTO", as you can see in the second screenshot above.

Could you please verify our theory? Is it the size of the DOM that makes the extension have that unpleasant behavior?

If this is true, then what can we do on our side to make it easier for the extension? Can we add some meta field or something so that it will be easier for it to identify us?

This is a very unpleasant behavior for our clients and we would like to fix it asap. So any help would be great.

Thanks,
Meletis

The SurveyCTO team

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1Password Version: 6.8.1
Extension Version: 4.6.10.90
OS Version: OS X 10.12.6
Sync Type: Not Provided

littlebobbytables

Hello @meletis,

So the title analysis is pretty simplistic where we use a combination of the domain and the document title as set by the page. As you will no doubt agree, it is independent of the DOM size given the two pieces of information used.

The size of the DOM, specifically the number of input fields will have a massive impact on the responsiveness of the extension. To determine if we should offer to save at all, what fields we need to record for later filling we traverse all input fields and in some cases have to perform a number of small tests due to the existence of what we call fake password fields, fields that a surface inspection of would not reveal their true purpose. We can't afford to ignore hidden fields either because of the way that many sites work. Would this help explain what you're observing based on your knowledge of the page structure?