Is Autocomplete="Off" Compatible With All Modern Browsers

Is autocomplete=off compatible with all modern browsers?

Be aware that all major browsers are moving towards ignoring the attribute for password fields.

I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but I've yet to come across a browser that fails to respect autocomplete="off", this experience covers:

• Firefox 1.5+ (Windows and Ubuntu)
• Opera 6+ (Windows and Ubuntu)
• Chrome v2+ (Windows and Ubuntu)
• Epiphany 0.8 (ish) (Ubuntu)
• Midori (I can't remember which version)
• Safari v1+ (Windows)
• IE 4 - 8, Windows.

I'm aware that Greasemonkey scripts, and presumably other user-scripts, can disable the autocomplete setting.

There's a couple of articles I found that might be useful to you:

1. How to turn off form auto-completion
2. Using auto-complete in html forms

How to disable autocomplete for all major browsers

Autocomplete should work with the following <input> types: text, search, url, tel, email, password, datepickers, range, and color.

But alas, you could try adding autocomplete='off' to your <form> tag instead of the <input> tag, unless there's something preventing you from doing that.

If that doesn't work, you could also use JavaScript:

if (document.getElementsByTagName) {
    var inputElements = document.getElementsByTagName(“input”);
    for (i=0; inputElements[i]; i++) {
        if (inputElements[i].className && (inputElements[i].className.indexOf(“disableAutoComplete”) != -1)) {
            inputElements[i].setAttribute(“autocomplete”,”off”);
        }
    }
}

Or in jQuery:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $(':input').live('focus',function(){
        $(this).attr('autocomplete', 'off');
    });
});

Is there a W3C valid way to disable autocomplete in a HTML form?

Here is a good article from the MDC which explains the problems (and solutions) to form autocompletion.
Microsoft has published something similar here, as well.

To be honest, if this is something important to your users, 'breaking' standards in this way seems appropriate. For example, Amazon uses the 'autocomplete' attribute quite a bit, and it seems to work well.

If you want to remove the warning entirely, you can use JavaScript to apply the attribute to browsers that support it (IE and Firefox are the important browsers) using someForm.setAttribute( "autocomplete", "off" ); someFormElm.setAttribute( "autocomplete", "off" );

Finally, if your site is using HTTPS, IE automatically turns off autocompletion (as do some other browsers, as far as I know).

Update

As this answer still gets quite a few upvotes, I just wanted to point out that in HTML5, you can use the 'autocomplete' attribute on your form element. See the documentation on W3C for it.

which web browsers (and which versions) implement the autocomplete=off feature?

According to MDN: input element the autocomplete attribute is supported from these browser versions:

Desktop:

• Chrome 17.0
• Firefox 4.0
• Internet Explorer 5
• Opera 9.6
• Safari 5.2

Mobile:

• Android : unknown
• Firefox Mobile 4.0
• IE Mobile : all
• Opera Mobile : all
• Safari Mobile : all

autocomplete= off not working in chrome

It appears that Chrome now ignores autocomplete="off" unless it is on the <form autocomplete="off"> tag since v34.

you can't cheat by create an hidden input over. Auto complete feature will get the first input text to fill data.

Method 1:

<form id="" method="post" action="" autocomplete="off">
    <input type="text" style="display:none" />
    <input type="password" style="display:none">
    <asp:textbox autocomplete="off">
</form>

So put this before your textbox.

<input type="text" style="display:none" />

Method 2:

Change

autocomplete="off" 

to

autocomplete="false" 

Method 3:
Browser autofill in by readonly-mode.

 <input type="password" readonly onfocus="this.removeAttribute('readonly');"/>

Method 4:

For username password combinations. Chrome heuristics looks for the pattern.

<input type="text" onfocus="this.type='password'">

Method 5:
jQuery

if ($.browser.webkit) {
    $('input[name="password"]').attr('autocomplete', 'off');
    $('input[name="email"]').attr('autocomplete', 'off');
}

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