Question

Is it possible to selectively disable the autofill feature in text fields using code?

I’m developing my custom code in ASP.Net AJAX to search for the suggestion in the database and I would like to prevent the browser suggestions from appearing when the user starts typing in the textbox.

I’m looking for a solution that works in the most modern browsers (IE 7 & 8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome). It’s is ok if the workaround is in Javascript.

Answer 1

Look at the autocomplete HTML attribute (on form or input tags).

<form [...] autocomplete="off"> [...] </form>

W3C > Autocomplete attribute

Edit:

Nowadays – from the comments – web browsers do not always respect the autocomplete tag defined behavior. This non-respect could be surrounded with a little of JavaScript code but you should think about you want to do before use this.

First, fields will be filled during the page loading and will only be emptied once the page load. Users will question why the field has been emptied.

Second, this will reset other web browser mechanisms, like the autofill of a field when you go back to the previous page.

jQuery( function()
{
  $("input[autocomplete=off]").val( "" );
} );

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

<form method="post" action="">
  <div class="form-group">
    <label for="username">Username</label>
    <input type="text" id="username" name="username" value="John" autocomplete="off">
  </div>
  <div class="form-group">
    <label for="password">Password</label>
    <input type="password" id="password" name="password" value="qwerty" autocomplete="off">
  </div>
  <input type="submit" value="Login">
</form>