Agreed. Autocomplete would be awesome. I think it's pretty much expected from any search engine nowadays. I like how Chrome and iCab will sometimes use google's autocomplete even if I'm doing a DDG search, but I wish it was also available straight from the site's search field.
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.
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.
Autocompletion is _the_ primary reason I switched to Chrome. It Just Works, even going so far as to learn it should switch from maps.google.com to maps.google.com.au when I type "maps". It wasn't too long before the AU site went from the second suggestion to the first. This saves me tons of typing every single day.
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.)
As a user, Chrome's autocomplete went down the drain for me once they started to fill all fields at once. I tried to autocomplete one field and often chrome filled the other fields with unfitting data. This happened so often that I started to manually complete fields even if autocomplete was available. I still miss the good old times[tm] of single-field autocomplete...
(And for the record: As a developer, I have been bitten by Chrome ignoring autocomplete="off" as well.)
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