I personally find it awful in Chrome because they don't handle the autocomplete experience correctly, and I always end up searching for what they complete instead of what I wanted which happened to be a prefix of it.
I see similar things across the board. Chrome has terrible autocomplete also. The suggestions have to be physically back-spaced to avoid them being autocompleted when you press enter.
I think I agree with you - autocomplete=off more often than not just makes me angry. It's honestly a big reason why I prefer Chrome, it tends to do the right thing here.
I didn't realize until now that it doing the right thing from my (the user's) perspective was because it was breaking a web standard, but damn if I don't find it useful.
I have my own extension for Chrome that yanks the autocomplete attribute. I much rather deal with over eager completion than websites disabling it for silly reasons and pseudo security.
There are valid arguments for both sides, but instead of forcing this upon everyone, Chrome team could have added it as a config option. Set the defaults for autocomplete anyway you like, and then let the user change the behaviour only on some sites. Or if you don't wish to pollute the settings with this, extract this behaviour into an extension and let the people choose if it bothers them enough to go and install it.
I also hate autocomplete. It just gets in my way. Autocomplete doesn't really work unless you already know what you're going to code, and if you already know what you're going to write the autocomplete prompt just gets in the way and often messes with keyboard entry of what I was typing. I just switch it off, it never saved me any time and just gets kind of annoying.
God I love chrome's autocomplete. HN is 'n', reddit is 'r', Facebook is 'f', gmail is 'g'... It's such a great usability feature. Google's approach with Chrome seems to be making the browser as invisible as possible, and I love it.
As a user, I think Chrome ignoring autocomplete=off is great and if it was a flag, I would enable it without hesitation. This feature is misused all the time.
I'm all for allowing the user to control whether autocomplete is or isn't respected. But the browser breaking web standards to force certain choices on the user is about the worst possible way to go about this.
> The user should never have to take extra steps to not use autocomplete
This! I hate it when I type a word, hit enter, and the widget search for a totally different search term that happens to begin with that word as its prefix. Firefox and Chrome, I'm looking at you.
And no, "press Backspace to search for what you actually typed" is not a good solution.
Here are some of my Chrome autocompletes: n (news.ycombinator.com), mu (music.google.com), ma (mail.google.com), a (amazon.com), gi (github.com), q (quora.com), l (localhost), i (images.google.com), c (coursera.com). I don't think I even give it a second thought after pressing these characters. I just do 'n' and Return.
Your experience might be worse, probably because you haven't used chrome enough.
I've been noticing that Chrome's autocomplete does not work on significantly more sites than it does. Each time I've been inspecting the HTML and sometimes its caused by unsemantic form field names, but more often it's forcefully disabled with `autocomplete="off"`. Why are people doing this? It's cumbersome and error prone to fill in the same monotonous information over and over, please let my browser do it for me.
At the same time many many many dumb corp-o-rat shit sites disable autocomplete because cOmpLiEncE. And users love autocomplete...
Naturally the problem is choice. Chrome/G should show a button to auto fill fields.
They could simply unleash some AI magic, train a network to recognize good and bad sites, etc. (Aka. the Apple way. As they also have a we know better policy, and users seem to love that.)
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