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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

Chrome is fun, today I learned you cannot turn off auto-complete for a page in chrome. Possibly some really creative hacks can do it but those seem to be "fixed" every so often as well. Which is great when you're building a HIPAA compliant page and would prefer that people's medical information not get cached by chrome (and then uploaded to their cloud storage if you're logged in).

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> Chrome is fun, today I learned you cannot turn off auto-complete for a page in chrome.

Because people were abusing it left-and-right to prevent password managers, and as e.g. banks (my own bank did this...) rarely listen to customers, Google instead decided to disable that opt-out for everyone instead.

I remember reading that the Chrome team made a point of forcing autocomplete for password fields (out of some opinions about built-in password managers). But I didn't know they were expanding that sentiment to all kinds of autocompletion.

Not that this would surprise me with Chrome's general attitude...

I agree with Chrome's decision here. The data remains the property of the user, they are free to cache it on their machine or upload it to Google if they so desire. Pages that disable autocomplete (or break it with hacks) should die.

This has worked for me for a few years without needing changing (for spelling test, so definitely don't want autocomplete :)

    <form name="form" onsubmit="checkspelling()" autocomplete="off" spellcheck="false" >Enter spelling: <input id="textfield" name="textfield" size="20" type="text" style="font-size:32pt;" autocomplete="off" > <input value="OK" onclick="checkspelling()" type="button" " style="font-size:32pt;">

I don't remember which bits were added for which browsers...

URLs should not contain PII data. That is a very bad design.

[Edit] I've got the wrong end of the stick it seems.

Where did I say URL? I'm talking a POST based form.

Put a value into it a text field and Chrome will helpfully save it for future auto-completion. Then it'll upload it to your account on their cloud if you're logged into an account. How do you think it's able to fill out your name, address, etc. on all those web forms?

I'm sorry. I'm out of date it seems. I thought autocomplete="false" worked for non authentication/non common fields. I'll have to check this out in the office later.

It looks as though Google have gradually eliminated support for this because "reasons" https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30053167/autocomplete-of...

It also won't listen when you say "this is not a login field", super fun.

So why are you still using Chrome?

He is talking about supporting chrome as a client browser, not using it personally.

Ah, right, I misread the original comment. Thank you for the correction.

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