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Comment by gkya | Hacker News Reader

> There's very few occasions when autocomplete being disabled makes sense

What are those (seriously, I can't think of any off the top of my head).

I know of one from a previous project. We had a prompt that said "enter your home address" with JavaScript autocomplete using google location APIs. Unfortunately chrome would try to auto fill this box with a city name (not even the full address) and this auto fill prompt sat on top of the JS drop down.

Wouldn't making it a textarea w/ rows=1 work? AFAIK textarea is not completed.

So we're back to hacks to replicate a feature that browser developers have decided to ignore? Gotta love web technology.

If "just use a textarea" is a valid solution, why did Google even bother not honoring autocomplete?

Well, the web technology is a pile of sh.t and in this case with the textarea you don't put your hands as deep in to is as you'd with the text input. That's how I interact with the web technology.

It's just amusing, that's all.

Prediction for the future:

1. Google implements auto-complete for one-line textareas

2. Web developers create textareas with 2 lines but hide the bottom line with CSS and disable the return key

3. Something so diabolical even I can't think of it

Yea that's a good idea. I don't like it because it's hacky, but if that's the only option... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's a bug in autocompletion -- if it had autofilled correctly, with the full address -- there would be no discussion here.

If autocompletion had worked as intended, everyone would be happier than if it was disabled.

In our user management portal, whenever tech support opens the Create New User or Reset User Password page Chrome helpfully fills their administrative password into the user's password field.

So in your user management portal, you assign new users or replace your lost passwords with passwords you set, thus you know? Oh my days! Generate it randomly and mail the user, or better, mail them a link to reset/create password page. Otherwise, just make it a plain input field, because if you know it, it's not hidden anyways.

Every hurdle vs. proper security has been non-technical. Slowly making progress :-)

Any search box where you want to hit a backend server and do typeahead searching.

Edit - for a good example, google use it on their search box.

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