How to Google Chrome Turn Off Autocomplete

google chrome turn off autocomplete I have been running into issues with the chrome autofill behavior on several forms.

The fields in the form all have very common and accurate names, such as "email", "name", or "password", and they also have autocomplete="off" set.

The autocomplete flag has successfully disabled the autocomplete behavior, where a dropdown of values appear as you start typing, but has not changed the values that Chrome auto-populates the fields as.

This behavior would be ok except that chrome is filling the inputs incorrectly, for example filling the phone input with an email address. Customers have complained about this, so it's verified to be happening in multiple cases, and not as some some sort of result to something that I've done locally on my machine.

The only current solution I can think of is to dynamically generate custom input names and then extract the values on the backend, but this seems like a pretty hacky way around this issue. Are there any tags or quirks that change the autofill behavior that could be used to fix this?

Solution 1

've just found that if you have a remembered username and password for a site, the current version of Chrome will autofill your username/email address into the field before any type=password field. It does not care what the field is called - just assumes the field before password is going to be your username.

Old Solution

Just use <form autocomplete="off"> and it prevents the password prefilling as well as any kind of heuristic filling of fields based on assumptions a browser may make (which are often wrong). As opposed to using <input autocomplete="off"> which seems to be pretty much ignored by the password autofill (in Chrome that is, Firefox does obey it).

Updated Solution

Chrome now ignores <form autocomplete="off">. Therefore my original workaround (which I had deleted) is now all the rage.

Simply create a couple of fields and make them hidden with "display:none". Example:

<!-- fake fields are a workaround for chrome autofill getting the wrong fields -->
<input style="display:none" type="text" name="fakeusernameremembered"/>
<input style="display:none" type="password" name="fakepasswordremembered"/>

Then put your real fields underneath.

Remember to add the comment or other people on your team will wonder what you are doing!

Update March 2016

Just tested with latest Chrome - all good. This is a fairly old answer now but I want to just mention that our team has been using it for years now on dozens of projects. It still works great despite a few comments below. There are no problems with accessibility because the fields are display:none meaning they don't get focus. As I mentioned you need to put them before your real fields.

If you are using javascript to modify your form, there is an extra trick you will need. Show the fake fields while you are manipulating the form and then hide them again a millisecond later.

Example code using jQuery (assuming you give your fake fields a class):

        $(".fake-autofill-fields").show();
        // some DOM manipulation/ajax here
        window.setTimeout(function () {
            $(".fake-autofill-fields").hide();
        },1);

Solution 2

For new Chrome versions you can just put autocomplete="new-password" in your password field and that's it. I've checked it, works fine.

Solution 3

After months and months of struggle, I have found that the solution is a lot simpler than you could imagine:

Instead of autocomplete="off" use autocomplete="false" ;)

As simple as that, and it works like a charm in Google Chrome as well!