Question

Is it possible to disable Firefox’s auto-fill feature without disabling auto-complete?

I know I can do this:

autocomplete="off"

But I don’t want to disable auto-complete, just the auto-fill.

Firefox is populating some of our hidden fields which are meant to be empty

This is mostly a problem when the user refreshes the page. The form fields are re-populated with values from pre-refresh. An example of this being a problem is old-school place-holder. Where we populate the field with a value, and remove it on submit. The value is re-populated on refresh and we don’t know if it’s the place-holder or use value.

Answer 1

If the problem is that FF is populating the fields when the user refreshes, this is actually a feature of Firefox to try to help the user in the case of accidental refresh so they don’t lose whatever they have typed. I don’t think you can override this with the HTML. You could use JavaScript to clear/reset all the relevant form values on page load. If a form.reset() on the form doesn’t work, you will have to iterate over the form elements and clear them like this:

for (i = 0; i < frm_elements.length; i++)
{
    field_type = frm_elements[i].type.toLowerCase();
    switch (field_type)
    {
    case "text":
    case "password":
    case "textarea":
    case "hidden":
        frm_elements[i].value = "";
        break;
    case "radio":
    case "checkbox":
        if (frm_elements[i].checked)
        {
            frm_elements[i].checked = false;
        }
        break;
    case "select-one":
    case "select-multi":
        frm_elements[i].selectedIndex = -1;
        break;
    default:
        break;
    }
}