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Ask HN: Why do you disable HTML form autocomplete?

8 points by tericho ↗ HN
I've been noticing that Chrome's autocomplete does not work on significantly more sites than it does. Each time I've been inspecting the HTML and sometimes its caused by unsemantic form field names, but more often it's forcefully disabled with `autocomplete="off"`. Why are people doing this? It's cumbersome and error prone to fill in the same monotonous information over and over, please let my browser do it for me.

6 comments

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wglb
Recent releases of IE and Chrome now, unfortunately, ignore the "autocomplete=off" setting. Being required to fill it in each time is annoying, but it is surprisingly easy for an exploit to get the browser to cough up the credentials. So it appears that this issue will soon be moot, with all browsers autocompleting regardless.

What I do is to use 1password and paste the password in.

tericho
I'm on the latest public Chrome release (39.0.2171.95) and it does not force autocomplete. I also use 1Passsword but for addresses and other non-password fields I use Chrome's autocomplete.
MiddleEndian
Back in the day, Opera did not care whether a form had autocomplete set to off, or even if a form was bizarrely structured, the magic wand would fill in whatever you wanted on command.

If only it didn't morph into a low quality Chrome-clone...

stenius
I've seen people use placeholders to label form fields. If something got auto completed, it might contain incorrect data.
tericho
Placeholders do not get submitted with forms AFAIK. So I don't see what that has to do with autocomplete.