Quite a while back, I was part of a discussion on a forum (not the osCommerce forum) about Jakob Neilsen’s ideas on password masking. You can read Mr Neilsen’s thoughts here).
My idea was that his thoughts are valid, and are based on usability. My opinion is that 90% of users don’t need to have the passwords starred out (as there is no-one with them at the time of filling in a form). Note that I do not agree with some of the bunkum that Neilsen spouts!
Anyway, fast forward 6 months and whilst searching Google for something entirely unrelated, I found this blog post. So, why not give the option of having your users password fields starred or not?
With a bit of copy and paste, I got this into osCommerce on the create_account and login page.
All rather easy, and less than 5 minutes work!
All credits to Jakob Neilsen and to a fellow Devonshire Developer John Whish.