It’s pretty incredible to see the amount of steaming developers commenting on this issue. What tools do developers have, when platform providers turn a deaf ear to their needs?
autocomplete=off should just be removed and it be entirely up to the user-agent whether it gets used like reader mode.
I think these features should be like the notifications pop-ups “This site requested that Chrome not automatically fill out forms. Tap here to enable autofill anyway for this site.”
Giving the user more control is great: things like reader mode, option to disable auto-play video or options to kill resource-intensive scripts. This isn't a tool for the user, it is the browser's behavior whether the user wants it or not.
If autocomplete=off is user-hostile, then it should be changed in the spec. The spec gives a few use cases (site has its own autocomplete, field is sensitive information that shouldn't be cached, field is a one-time key). If autocomplete=off is removed, how would those cases be handled?
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control-infrastr...
Chrome decided to add autocomplete to some of our fields with contextually irrelevant options. As far as I know there isn't anything I can reliably do about it.