Autocomplete is a nice feature which fills in common form fields automatically for the user. However, in some cases you don’t want this to happen. IE uses a non-standard attribute (autocomplete=”off”) that can be added to an entire form or one specific input control. Besides the fact that this attribute will make your HTML markup fail compliance tests, Firefox seems to consider this tag merely a “suggestion” and will disregard it at times.

In particular, Firefox will *always* populate certain password fields. There is seemingly no way to tell Firefox not to fill in a field if it really wants to do so. This can be a very bad thing if you are dealing with a user preference page or something sensitive where you don’t want autocomplete to ever occur under any circumstance. Setting value=”" is equally worthless because Firefox seems to populate this value just after the page is rendered.

The following code however will work. The concept is basially to set a timeout a fraction of a second after the page loads which clears the password field. Technically Firefox still populates the field, however this script code removes it almost instantly. As an added bonus, because you are not using autocomplete=”off” your HTML markup should still validate. This code should be placed at the bottom of your page beneath your form.

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>
// this brutally clears a password field in firefox
// compliments of verysimple.com
function clearPwBox()
{
if (document.getElementById)
{
var pw = document.getElementById(’MyPasswordFieldName’);
if (pw != null)
{
pw.value = ”;
}
}
}
window.setTimeout(”clearPwBox()”, 100);
</script>

This code could probably be made more generic by enumerating through the form elements and searching for a certain class name. This way you could have one script and simply append a classname to any field that you don’t want auto-complete to occur. This technique is similar to one posted on Chris Holland’s blog. Chris’s solution, however, is aimed exclusively at the Wc3 compliance issue. As you can see in his code he adds the autocomplete=”off” attribute, which allows the page to validate properly, but doesn’t solve the Firefox/Password field issue.

If you have a more graceful solution and/or decide to flesh this idea out, please post a comment and I’ll provide a link to your site.

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