2019, Chrome 76, approach to autocomplete off

Question

There are are few posts out there about this. You spend hours going through each answer, testing, reading comments, to find that there is no solution. What have you done in 2019, Chrome 76, that works?

Answer 1

Update, January 2020: It appears that as of Chrome 79, Autocomplete (as defined here) no longer treats autocomplete="some-unrecognised-value" as equal to autocomplete="on", so autocomplete="nope" or similar is now effective at disabling both Autocomplete and Autofill.

Update, April 2020: They changed it again. As of Chrome 81, autocomplete="some-unrecognised-value" is no longer effective at disabling the Autocomplete mechanism. However, Autofill now seems to be a lot more conservative than it was before - it still doesn't follow the spec (a field with name="email" and autocomplete="off" will still receive Autofill suggestions) but it doesn't offer up spurious address fragments on random form fields. My recommendation right now would therefore be to use autocomplete="off". If you want to do that on a field named email, you're probably out of luck though :-(

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TL,DR: There appears to be no setting for the autocomplete attribute that will reliably turn off all autocomplete dropdowns. However, the circumstances that have led to this are quite convoluted and worth documenting, to hopefully clear up the masses of conflicting advice...

There are two distinct mechanisms present in current (76.0.3809.132) versions of Chrome, which we'll refer to as Autofill and Autocomplete (not necessarily their official names):

Autofill

The Autofill feature attempts to fill in forms using the address information stored in your browser settings. It can be identified by the "Manage addresses..." option (or similar) at the bottom of the dropdown. This feature does not honour autocomplete="off" or autocomplete="false", as a deliberate decision on the part of the Chrome developers.

In a statement outlining this decision, zkoch offered this workaround:

In cases where you really want to disable autofill, our suggestion at this point is to utilize the autocomplete attribute to give valid, semantic meaning to your fields. If we encounter an autocomplete attribute that we don't recognize, we won't try and fill it.

As an example, if you have an address input field in your CRM tool that you don't want Chrome to Autofill, you can give it semantic meaning that makes sense relative to what you're asking for: e.g. autocomplete="new-user-street-address". If Chrome encounters that, it won't try and autofill the field.

This is the basis of attempted solutions such as autocomplete="nope"; the Autofill mechanism will skip any fields with autocomplete attribute values it doesn't recognise.

The code that implements this decision, for the record: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/tags/78.0.3903.1/components/autofill/core/browser/form_structure.cc#1218

Autocomplete

The Autocomplete feature provides a dropdown of previously-submitted values from this form field. This dropdown does not have a "Manage addresses..." option. Autocomplete does honour the autocomplete="off" or autocomplete="false" attribute; any other value (including 'invalid' ones such as autocomplete="nope") will leave it enabled.

Conclusion

Autocompletion dropdowns cannot be turned off through the autocomplete dropdown; any value that disables Autofill will leave Autocomplete enabled, and vice versa. Anyone who thinks they've found a working solution (either through autocomplete or some other method such as CSS hacks) should check that it works against both mechanisms.

Unfortunately it's probably going to be an uphill struggle to convince Chrome's developers that this is broken. The developers of Autofill apparently believe that they made a calculated decision to break autocomplete="off" while offering web developers an alternative; that alternative is broken, for more subtle reasons than they realise. From their perspective, the resulting howls of protest are coming from disgruntled developers too lazy to jump through one little hoop and update their autocomplete="off" attributes. In all the noise, the message isn't getting through: the hoop is broken.

Answer 2

Try using type="search" instead of "text" for your input field, I've done this several time and it works for me.

Answer 3

As of Dec 6, 2019, with Chrome v78.x

Standard methods like autocomplete="off" are now working almost fine for the latest versions of Chrome. Except for this one:

This thing is a real bummer because it doesn't only disrespect the standard/non-standard values like "nope" but there's literally no way to turn this off unless the input is not even remotely related with "addressy" terms.

How on earth we could possibly display address-related input fields without using address-related words? Here comes the easiest solution ever.

• Make sure the input element's name and id don't include any address-related terms. Attributes like id="input-street" or name="destination-zip" are big no-no.

• This is the most crucial part: If you are required to use any human-readable address terms for the text input or any of its adjacent elements, insert the "invisible" zero width joiner (‌) between the letters of the said term. In this way, we can fool the AI capability of Chrome and bypass its strict autocompletion behavior.

Some working examples:

<input id="input-stret" placeholder="S&zwnj;treet" autocomplete="off">

<form action="/action_page.php">
  <label for="product-addres">Product A&zwnj;ddress</label>
  <input name="addres" id="product-addres" autocomplete="off">
</form>

And there you go. No more pesky menus for managing addresses, nor any regular autocompletion menus.

Answer 4

As gasman's answer explains, both the autofill and autocomplete features must be disabled, which doesn't seem possible on a single input.
The only working solution I've found is to setting autocomplete="off" on the input and add hidden fake inputs before the real input that fool autofill, like so:

<input name="Fake_Username" id="Fake_Username" type="text" style="display:none">
<input name="Fake_Password" id="Fake_Password" type="password" style="display:none">
<input name="NameInput" id="NameInput" type="text" autocomplete="off">

Answer 5

* This answer is incorrect. I've published a better (but uglier) solution as a new answer and kept this answer since some parts may still be useful. If that's not how to deal with incorrect answers on stackoverflow, feel free to delete this one *

Consider using autocomplete=<nonce>, where <nonce> is unique per field and across page loads.

For example, if a field is the N-th field created after the page was requested at timestamp TS, its <nonce> can be chosen to be nope_<TS>_<N>.

Effect on autocomplete: since <nonce> is a custom value for autocomplete, chromium does not activate the autocomplete function (see form_structure.cc).

Effect on autofill: chromium recognizes a field by comparing its fingerprint with those of earlier encountered fields (see form_field_data.cc). If recognized it may offer a list of remembered values. The fingerprints contain the value of the autocomplete attribute. Since no two nonces are equal, no field is recognized.

Notes:

• The terms autocomplete and autofill as used here are swapped compared to gasman's reply.

• All fields should be created dynamically on the client-side (unless you are willing to not have the page cached).

Answer 6

Disabling autofill: Set autocomplete attribute to a non-standard value, e.g. "nope".

Disabling autocomplete: The autocomplete function stores field names and their values when a form is submitted. There's (almost, see note 1) nothing sensible to be done to prevent storage except setting autocomplete to "off"/"false" (see why). Unfortunately that's not an option as it would enable autofill.

However it's possible to prevent retrieval of previous values by appending "!<nonce>" to the field names, where <nonce> is unique per page load (thus making field names unrecognizable).

On the client side this can be achieved by something like the following line of javascript (upon page load):

Array.prototype.slice.call(document.body.getElementsByTagName('INPUT'))
   .forEach(function(elt) { elt.name += '!' + new Date().getTime(); });

On the server side the part (if any) starting at "!" should be dropped from variable names (upon receiving post variables).

PS: this answer is an erratum to my earlier solution which is cleaner but wasn't sufficiently tested and - as gasman rightly pointed out - doesn't work for ordinary forms. This new solution was tested on Chrome Canary 79, does work, has relatively small impact and degrades nicely. Still, I feel guilty about publishing this hack and will feel even more guilty if I ever encounter it in real forms. It is *very* dirty.

Note 1: the only way to prevent storage that does make sense is to not set the name attribute in the first place (or to unset it), which necessitates intercepting the submit event to post the data "manually" (using XMLHttpRequest). Since the question is about forms and this strategy bypasses the traditional form-mechanism I've not elaborated on that approach. It's a nicer solution though.

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Addendum: I decided to follow up on note 1 since I really dislike having a non-localized solution. Here's a localized version in vanilla JS that limits all impact to a single spot on the client side. Append it as a script to the document body or put it in the onload handler of the document.

function disableInputSuggestions(form) { // note: code uses ECMA5 features 
    // tweak the inputs of form 
    var inputs = Array.prototype.slice.call(form.getElementsByTagName('INPUT'));
    var nonce = Date.now();
    inputs.forEach(function(input, i) { 
        input.autocomplete = 'nope'; // prevent autocomplete
        input.originalName = input.name || input.id; // to not let this code break form handling of inputs without names (browsers fallback to the id in that case)
        input.name = nonce + '_' + i; // prevent autofill (if you're willing to eliminate all input ids first, then clear the name instead)
    });
    // replace the default submit handler by a custom one 
    form.onsubmit = function(ev) {
        // get the form data using the original variable names
        var formData = new FormData();
        inputs.forEach(function(input) { formData.set(input.originalName, input.value); });
        // submit the form data using XMLHttpRequest (alternatively, use a helper form or temporarily undo the tweaks to form) 
        var submitter = new XMLHttpRequest();
        submitter.open(form.getAttribute('method'), form.getAttribute('action'));
        submitter.onreadystatechange = function() {
            if(submitter.readyState == 4 && submitter.status == 200) {
                // handle the server response, here assuming the default form.target = "_self"  
                document.open();
                document.write(submitter.responseText);
                document.close();
            }
        }
        submitter.send(formData);
        return false; // prevent submitting form
    }; 
}
disableInputSuggestions(document.forms.myForm); // assumed: the form has id = myForm

Answer 7

In Chrome 91

You need to use a random value, meaning a value that will change each time you load the page.

From the tests that I did, chrome seems to remember any attribute value that it already encountered and will suggest the last seen value for that attribute value the next time. So, if you put autocomplete="nope", chrome will remember that autocomplete="nope" is equal to the last value that you put in autocomplete="nope".

By using a unique random value that chrome has never seen, it won't suggest anything because it has never seen that value.

PHP 7 Example

<input type="text" name="firstname" autocomplete="<?= bin2hex(random_bytes(10)) ?>" />

Limitations

It seems to work on address fields but it has no effect on login fields. I haven't tested with credit card fields.

Answer 8

Chrome version 81.

For me, when input type is TEL, EMAIL or SEARCH, it WORKS with autocomplete='disabled'. When input type is NUMBER, it WORKS with autocomplete='off'.

But when input type is TEXT .. it may works with autocomplete='off'. If not, it will do with autocomplete='disabled'.

You can try this, perhaps it will work for you (it works in 95% of cases for me) :

// Désactivation de l'autocomplete des input text
function setAutocomplete(val) {
    var E = document.getElementsByTagName('INPUT');
    for (var i = 0 ; i < E.length ; i++) {
        if (E[i].name == 'txt_nom') { console.log('txt_nom', E[i]); }
        var type = E[i].type.toUpperCase();
        if (E[i].autocomplete != '') { continue; }
        if (type == 'HIDDEN') {
            //
        } else if (type == 'NUMBER') {
            E[i].autocomplete = 'off';
        } else if ((type == 'TEL') || (type == 'EMAIL') || (type == 'SEARCH')) {
            E[i].autocomplete = 'disabled';
        } else {
            E[i].autocomplete = val;
        }
    }
}

// Exécution de diverses fonctions à la fin de chaque chargement
window.addEventListener("load", function() {
    // Désactivation de l'autocomplete des input text
    setAutocomplete('off');
});

Answer 9

try this, I used this little trick and it worked until now (September 2020). i hope this works for a lot of people

--HTML--
<input type="text" name="example" autocomplete="off">
    
--Javascript--
let elements = document.querySelectorAll('[autocomplete="off"]');
elements.forEach(element => {
    element.setAttribute("readonly", "readonly");
    element.style.backgroundColor = "inherit";
    setTimeout(() => {
        element.removeAttribute("readonly");
    }, 500);
})

Answer 10

I made a small jQuery plugin that disables any type of autocomplete feature from any browser

It is made to be used on the form tag, it takes few parameters and can be nested with other jQuery methods.

$('#login_form').randomizeFormFields();

It transforms this:

<form id="login_form" action="" method="post">
  <input type="text" name="email">
  <input type="password" name="secret">
</form>

Into this:

<form id="login_form" action="" method="post">
  <input type="text" name="yQoiFZkCrzwWXN3WWgM8Jblby">
  <input type="password" name="ono1qamA9CzrH4tW2COoRtFKI">
</form>

It preserves the original names upon submit

// returned post (php example)
array(2) {
  ["email"]=>
  string(16) "[email protected]"
  ["secret"]=>
  string(19) "supersecretpassword"
}

https://github.com/cicerogeorge/randomize-form-fields

Please fork it if you have ideas

Answer 11

I have tried with autocomplete = "off" and autocomplete = "nope" for EmailId textbox in html form but it is not working for Google Chrome. So I tried with below changes that worked for me.

<input type="email" class="tbx-input" name="Email" style="display:none;">

<input type="email" class="tbx-input" name="Email" id="Email" placeholder=" " required autocomplete="nope">

Answer 12

I couldnt get any of these suggestions to work... so I just made my input a textarea, made cols="1" and disabled adjusting the space.

<textarea style="resize: none;" type='search' class="form-control" rows="1" cols="50" .... >

No more suggestions