Prevent Form Field Autocomplete

By  on  

Preventing autocompletion of form fields is incredibly important since we never know where our users are completing them from. They could complete them from a super secure computer or an incredibly public computer. Regardless of security level, some field values should never be remembered, like credit card number, social security number, etc. Preventing autocompletion is as simple as adding one attribute to a FORM tag for individual form fields.

The HTML

The autocomplete attribute is the key. This attribute may be added FORM tags to prevent any autocompletion:

<form method="post" autocomplete="off">

You may also isolate single fields for preventing autocompletion:

<input type="text" name="credit_card" autocomplete="off" />

Big detail, simple task, simple solution.

Recent Features

  • By
    Chris Coyier&#8217;s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

  • By
    CSS Filters

    CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Record Text Selections Using MooTools or jQuery AJAX

    One technique I'm seeing more and more these days (CNNSI.com, for example) is AJAX recording of selected text. It makes sense -- if you detect users selecting the terms over and over again, you can probably assume your visitors are searching that term on Google...

  • By
    Using jQuery and MooTools Together

    There's yet another reason to master more than one JavaScript library: you can use some of them together! Since MooTools is prototype-based and jQuery is not, jQuery and MooTools may be used together on the same page. The XHTML and JavaScript jQuery is namespaced so the...

Discussion

  1. Slow day for blog posts? :P

  2. Pritesh Desai

    its a bad idea to make users type out their email id, name etc on every website. There’s a reason why autocomplete was invented.

    • As I stated, there are credit card numbers, social security numbers, passwords, etc. Those shouldn’t be remembered.

  3. simple-touriste

    Passwords should be remembered IF users want to them of be remembered.

    There is a bug about that in Chromium:
    https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=177290

    Until it’s fixed, there is an add-on for this:

    By using the feature, websites force me to use this add-on, which could decrease my security.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!