All browsers have their idiosyncrasies — Internet Explorer had so many Microsoft is changing its name.

Here’s another one of a hundred browser “idiot syncrasies” that wasted so much time.  I’ve always developed sites first for Firefox then Chrome then found I had to add more hacks on top for IE, the infamous “shiv” code still makes me shake my head — if only we didn’t have to waste so much web development time worrying about all those browsers and devices and focus on the solution.  If only we’d know the standard tires would work on every standard road!  Things are getting much better and standardized, but even the surge of Chrome users may find the latest updates are causing interface issues and new UX challenges.

One issue is dealing with forms, autofills and validation.  For Google Chrome, I wasted hours with a form auto fill behavior and discovered you have to set  autocomplete=”false”  instead of to “off” for the fields you don’t want the browser to automatically reset and take over.   It can cause real problems with certain forms that keep defaulting to the wrong state in a credit card because a user entered a different state elsewhere and didn’t notice it.  This could be the difference between making a sale or a customer leaving because the credit card information is incorrect.

For web developers out there, you all know Stack Overflow, this is the usually the first place web developers look when they are stumped, this is one of those times where once I realized it was a Chrome issue it took me two minutes to Google the problem, find the problem on Stack and implement the change.  It’s great when you encounter an odd problem and find the exact solution so quickly.

Here’s the link for more information, I hope this helps someone save some time!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15738259/disabling-chrome-autofill