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Comment by fshbbdssbbgdd | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, Chrome. So many sites have user-hostile code that is overridden by this choice. I still remember the glee when I first started using Chrome all those years ago, and suddenly all those forms filled themselves out.

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I’ve seen autocomplete create plenty of problems. It can break some (admittedly poorly designed) forms outright. Or in others simply create a bad user experience. There are lots of forms that ask for an address but that should never be autocompleted to the user’s address.

In practice as a developer you have to resort to JavaScript hacks and obfuscating form field names to avoid it.

Having worked on a number of CRM and other business applications, yep, it's maddening. Not all addresses and names are your address and name.

I really really wish there was a way (holding shift, ctrl or something) to only autofill the one field without it goig to fill/replace every other field on the page. It's so annoying when the stuff you just field get replaced just because you want to autofill one field.

My favorite is when it autofills a whole form that has the field name only as a hint that disappears once it's filled. Of course it always fills with the wrong set of information.

That sound's like the form's fault. Even filling it in manually, you won't be able to double-check that you entered the right information.

I typically type everything manually in long forms because the autofill tends to get something wrong every once in a while. It's like choosing to drive the car myself rather than trusting the self-driving feature.

I figure most people just tolerate wrong inputs and live with the results. (It doesn't happen that often.)

> It's very hackish way but I found a trick to achieve the same.

> So you should go to chrome://settings/addresses?search=address

> Now create multiple addresses, each with only one field filled. So one should only have your E-Mail, another record should contain only your first name only, and so on.

https://superuser.com/questions/477144/can-autofill-in-chrom...

A variation:

https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/31845659?hl=en

But any new code that's being written just finds other ways to avoid autocomplete. Ignoring autocomplete=off makes the web a bit less standards compliant for a a very short temporary benefit.

I'm the developer of a Virtual Terminal web page which allows a merchant to accept credit card payments. I would love to turn-off autocomplete for the credit card details. The person using the Virtual Terminal wants to type in someone else's card number, not use their own every time.

The PCI-DSS council is partly to blame here, for recommending autocomplete=off in other contexts.

I hate password forms that do this

I wish I didn’t have to disable clipboard events because of sites that think they know better to disable paste.

Why do they even do that? What’s so bad about pasting into a form? Does the person who designed the form think your password isn’t secure unless it is written on a piece of paper kept in a bank vault?

Especially when I'm pasting my routing number or bank account number.

Like are you kidding me? I went into my bank app/website, I used the "copy" feature, and I'm trying to paste here AND into your "confirmation" field. Because I don't want to typo it!

How could my copy skill be worse than my typing skill?

I'm on board with not allowing paste into a confirmation field since you might have copied the wrong number so there's nothing to gain from confirming the same mistake. Imagine you're doing several transactions and on one of them, you don't quite press the copy key correctly and end up using the previous account number from the clipboard.

Curious how you disable clipboard events? I always go into the dev console and do $0.value = '<my password>'

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