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Comment by romaaeterna | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago, I left a $1000 tip at the restaurant up the street because Chrome filled out the tip field with my zip code (which thankfully merely defaulted to max $1000 instead). The tip field was off-screen, and the ordering software didn't have a confirmation screen, just a "we just charged your card $X amount" screen, which made my eyes boggle.

EDIT: Looking at the original March 17th, 2015 bug, it would have been at exactly around that time...In fact, checking my emails, this happened on March 18th, 2015. I had ordered from them several times before this with no problems (they used "chownow.com" for their ordering backend).

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This has a lot of really serious implications. I built a form for a charity that allowed users to buy a subscription but include an additional donation amount. Chrome was sometimes filling that field with the two-digit year. The charity got a lot of complaints and it ruined the trust relationship with the donors who didn't understand what was happening and thought it was intentional.

Chrome has other behaviour that I think violates a sort of trust relationship. One of which is that Youtube would ask you "do you want to install Chrome"? Almost as if your current browser is not "what you need to access Youtube". This is especially a problem for elderly people who often use the web but don't really understand how things fit together (the way 5 year olds actually do).

> Almost as if your current browser is not "what you need to access Youtube"

This is not just confusing. It's intentionally misleading and unethical.

And it doesn't just affect old people, or YouTube wouldn't have come up with it. Lots of young people grew up with computers and understand how to do what they want to do, but they never develop a systematic understanding of what they're using.

It gets worse, though. While we tech-folk know that all modern browsers are supposed to have near-parity, Google optimizes its sites for Chrome, leading to additional confusion for both knowledgeable and lay users.

Fun fact: something similar once happened in production in the early days of an iPad-based point of sale startup.

In certain cases, a previously-entered zip code was interpreted as the number of cents to tip.

The tip field was off-screen

I wonder how much the [1] hiding of scrollbars and [2] UIs with excessive amounts of whitespace, increasing the need to scroll also contributed to you making this error.

We have trouble in our org with autofill on our New Customer forms. Depending on the browser it can be very difficult to remove the saved autocomplete values.

(How) did you resolve this?

How do you pay with Chrome at a restaurant?

Probably for pickup or delivery.

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