Valid use cases for autocomplete=off | Hacker News Reader

Valid use cases for autocomplete=off

bugs.chromium.org

52 pointsandrewstuart22 comments

It seems Google Chrome team has decided that autocomplete=off is bad for usability and now ignores it despite such a change breaking autocomplete fields all over the web. There's no sign they are going to change it so that autocomplete=off works again.

It's no longer up to you as a developer whether or not you think a field should autocomplete - Google has decided that for you.

Have a look at the address field on this image - you can see that autofill completely obscures Googles own autocomplete (which is a paid service) https://00e9e64bacbf59c74081b665c25aa171225f21f85c7201a66c-a... That's not good for users.

You simply cannot turn off either autofill or autocomplete.

Further info: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29931712/chrome-autofill...

Please, if you care about autocomplete=off then register a comment on the Chrome bug https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=587466

The strange thing is that this even breaks Google's own paid Google Maps autocomplete service - search the text in the linked Chrome bug page for "maps" to see what people have to say about that.

> Have a look at the address field on this image - you can see that autofill completely obscures Googles own autocomplete (which is a paid service) https://00e9e64bacbf59c74081b665c25aa171225f21f85c7201a66c-a.... That's not good for users.

You may want to reupload that image to an image hosting service. When I click that link, I get a page that says:

{"error":{"errors":[{"domain":"global","reason":"lockedDomainExpired","message":"Locked Domain Expired"}],"code":401,"message":"Locked Domain Expired"}}

I get why this is a thing - there are so many shitty UI-breaking abuses of this. But it’s terribly annoying when you do have a good use-case. Like so many features, I guess.

What’s the right solution to this problem?

Seems a better solution would be to give the user a say. If autocomplete is off, and the user wants to autocomplete the form, the user should be able to right-click in the form and select "Autocomplete this form," ideally as a one-time operation or for this form from now on.

I have done some digging since posting this.

Chromium appears to execute some logic to decide if it should show autofill for a given field. This logic appears to be analyzing text before the element that autofill is displayed on. I thought "if I know what that logic is then I can trick it into not displaying." I spent some time looking through the Chromium source code to find that logic and understand it, but I could not find it and don't have time to research it further. This seems the key though to managing this problem.

Other ways of addressing this might include using a different sort of HTML element instead of input. For example textarea or editable div.

More possible pointers to solutions are here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/49161445/627492

Those are ways to work around a problem that was unneccesarily and artificially injected. Why tolerate that and work-around it on your dime? Why not instead tell the person creating the problem "hey, don't create this problem you jerk!"

Previous discussion about this in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911116

Last I checked you can always give Chrome a stronger hint not to autocomplete using something like this:

    document.querySelectorAll("input[autocomplete=off]")
        .forEach(element =>
            element.autocomplete = window && window.chrome ? "hell-no-chrome" : "off"
        );

I think it's a shame that they didn't design UI or something to coordinate with the user to override it in less well-behaved web apps. Instead, they just decided to ignore it completely.

As a user I'm more often annoyed by autocompletion not working when it should. Either disabled by the developer or just defunct.

However they might want to step up their game on not trying to fill every user/password field they find. For example, Gitlab repository mirror settings will be autofilled with your login credentials and they will be saved if you don't pay attention to yellow boxes.

As a user I'm more often annoyed by autocompletion than the lack of it. I turn it off everywhere I can, including things like the keyboard on my phone. So that's a no-op, two microscopic anecdotal data points that exactly cancel each other out. Being a user or speaking from the perspective of a user didn't make any special difference.

I do like one form of auto-complete, which is the tab-complete in the bash shell. You are not autofilled or autocompleted or auto re-written or auto "you typed foo but we're showing you results for 'food' instead" 99% of the time. But once in a blue moon when you actually want something to be autocompleted, you can get suggestions for that one thing on the spot with an extra keypress. But you have to ask for it. It never messes with you all by itself.

I've made data entry software for the past 20 years. I've had plenty of tasks where users just wanted autocomplete off, many of them for privacy and security concerns. From a UX perspective, it's usually distracting and not useful on large forms, especially on fields that have small comments that tend to vary only slightly but at a part in the value that's cut off by the stupid drop down that doesn't expand beyond the width of the field for some reason. You get a huge list of things that all look the same. And sometimes that stupid long list is blocking a part of the form that has data you need to see to know what you need to enter into the field you're on.

There's a 100 other great reasons on there already. I really hope they don't do this. Most of my user base uses Chrome and I will start getting old tickets re-opened that I won't be able to fix without horrible hacks.

This received 23 points in 30 minutes, and yet it is no longer on the front-page? Compare that to this [1], which has received 23 points in 4 hours, and is still on the front page. Are some folks flagging this into oblivion?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18095356

too much velocity. probably artificial upvotes. also trying to make HN into a personal army to do achieve a goal doesn't sit well with mods. just report on news.

Maybe thats it. I've taken "protest here" off the title.

Yes, most of the upvotes were dropped by the software for being inorganic, but it was user flags that did it in (moderators didn't see it until now).

Edit: we've updated the title and turned off some of the flags.

What does inorganic upvotes mean?

I'm the original poster but I sure as heck didn't do anything to artificially upvote it. I didn't upvote it at all.

It's the software that tries to catch promotional votes a.k.a. voting rings. It does sometimes get things wrong, which is probably what happened here.

As sctb said, though, it's user flags that affected the post's rank the most. Perhaps the editorialized title had something to do with that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097611), and/or perhaps there is just fatigue with this class of submissions. People come to HN for unpredictable things, so whenever something starts to get predictable, they get ornery.

Yeah its odd - it doesn't seem to be a post that should be dropped.

I've emailed the HN mods to ask if they have any insight. Maybe it hit some sort of algorithm to prevent spammy posts.

my workaround for things like this is to do everything myself. Use a canvas, listen to keyboard and mouse events, then you have a input of your own.

maybe one day, under the governing of Chrome team, the only thing left in web is canvas. Then just thank Chrome for pushing the single-page application concept one step further.

If you are going to force auto complete on, fine. But at least make sure those ugly yellow field backgrounds that appear on autofill can be styled... This isn't possible in chrome and in our Web application it looked really ugly.

no protest. This is good for usability. I hate sites that disable autocomplete.

As a user, this sounds great.

Is there a Firefox extension to ignore autocomplete=off?

We've updated the title from “Google Chrome team has decided to ignore autocomplete=off”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com