319487 - autocomplete="off" should NOT stop session history from re-filling forms

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Layout: Form Controls, defect)

Description

[Adrian Yee]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

In bug 93972, things were changed to make session history not fill in forms that have autocomplete="off".  From my testing of IE 5.01, 5.5, 6.0, Opera 8.5 and Safari 1.3.1, none of these browsers seem exhibit this behaviour (perhaps it requires a certain combination of settings to happen?).  It makes sense for autocomplete="off" to prevent the form and password managers from pre-filling in the forms, but imho it doesn't make sense for it to reset the form values that have autocomplete="off" when using the session history.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit simple testcase url
2. Type something into both text inputs
3. Submit
4. Go Back

Actual Results:  
The text input with autocomplete="off" has been reset.

Expected Results:  
The text input with autocomplete="off" should keep the value that was entered previously, just like the other text input does.

Comment 1

[Martijn Wargers (dead)]

Seems to me that this was done on purpose:
http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvsblame.cgi?file=mozilla/content/base/src/nsDocument.cpp&rev=3.614#5048

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Martijn has the right link for the bfcache version of this behavior.  The non-bfcache version is much older and dates back to bug 93972.  Note the comments there about Microsoft's spec for autocomplete="off".

I'd love to know what recent IEs do in this case.

Comment 3

[Adrian Yee]

Tested it on the following browsers and it's still the same

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.53 Safari/525.19

Opera/9.63 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.1.1


The only other browser that's doing the same thing as Firefox is Safari 4 beta:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16