How to trigger Autofill in Google Chrome?

This question is pretty old but I have an updated answer!

Here's a link to the WHATWG documentation for enabling autocomplete.

Google wrote a pretty nice guide for developing web applications that are friendly for mobile devices. They have a section on how to name the inputs on forms to easily use auto-fill. Eventhough it's written for mobile, this applies for both desktop and mobile!

How to Enable AutoComplete on your HTML forms

Here are some key points on how to enable autocomplete:

  • Use a <label> for all your <input> fields
  • Add a autocomplete attribute to your <input> tags and fill it in using this guide.
  • Name your name and autocomplete attributes correctly for all <input> tags

  • Example:

    <label for="frmNameA">Name</label>
<input type="text" name="name" id="frmNameA"
placeholder="Full name" required autocomplete="name">

<label for="frmEmailA">Email</label>
<input type="email" name="email" id="frmEmailA"
placeholder="[email protected]" required autocomplete="email">

<!-- note that "emailC" will not be autocompleted -->
<label for="frmEmailC">Confirm Email</label>
<input type="email" name="emailC" id="frmEmailC"
placeholder="[email protected]" required autocomplete="email">

<label for="frmPhoneNumA">Phone</label>
<input type="tel" name="phone" id="frmPhoneNumA"
placeholder="+1-555-555-1212" required autocomplete="tel">

How to name your <input> tags

In order to trigger autocomplete, make sure you correctly name the name and autocomplete attributes in your <input> tags. This will automatically allow for autocomplete on forms. Make sure also to have a <label>! This information can also be found here.

Here's how to name your inputs:

  • Name
    • Use any of these for name: name fname mname lname
    • Use any of these for autocomplete:
      • name (for full name)
      • given-name (for first name)
      • additional-name (for middle name)
      • family-name (for last name)
    • Example: <input type="text" name="fname" autocomplete="given-name">
  • Email
    • Use any of these for name: email
    • Use any of these for autocomplete: email
    • Example: <input type="text" name="email" autocomplete="email">
  • Address
    • Use any of these for name: address city region province state zip zip2 postal country
    • Use any of these for autocomplete:
      • For one address input:
        • street-address
      • For two address inputs:
        • address-line1
        • address-line2
      • address-level1 (state or province)
      • address-level2 (city)
      • postal-code (zip code)
      • country
  • Phone
    • Use any of these for name: phone mobile country-code area-code exchange suffix ext
    • Use any of these for autocomplete: tel
  • Credit Card
    • Use any of these for name: ccname cardnumber cvc ccmonth ccyear exp-date card-type
    • Use any of these for autocomplete:
      • cc-name
      • cc-number
      • cc-csc
      • cc-exp-month
      • cc-exp-year
      • cc-exp
      • cc-type
  • Usernames
    • Use any of these for name: username
    • Use any of these for autocomplete: username
  • Passwords
    • Use any of these for name: password
    • Use any of these for autocomplete:
      • current-password (for sign-in forms)
      • new-password (for sign-up and password-change forms)

Resources

  • Current WHATWG HTML Standard for autocomplete.
  • "Create Amazing Forms" from Google. Seems to be updated almost daily. Excellent read.
  • "Help Users Checkout Faster with Autofill" from Google in 2015.

UPDATE for 2017: Looks like the answer from Katie has more up-to-date information than mine. Future readers: give your up-votes to her answer.

This is a great question and one for which documentation is surprisingly hard to come by. Actually, in many cases you will find that the Chrome Autofill functionality "just works." For example, the following snippet of html produces a form which, at least for me (Chrome v. 18), is automatically filled after clicking in the first field:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>    
<form method="post">
  First name:<input type="text" name="fname" /><br />
  Last name: <input type="text" name="lname" /><br />
  E-mail: <input type="text" name="email" /><br />
  Phone: <input type="text" name="phone" /><br />
  Address: <input type="text" name="address" /><br />
</form>
</body>
</html>

However, this answer is unsatisfactory, as it leaves the solution in the realm of "magic." Digging deeper I learned that Chrome (and other autofill-enabled browsers) primarily rely on contextual clues to determine the type of data that should be filled into form elements. Examples of such contextual clues include the name of an input element, the text surrounding the element, and any placeholder text.

Recently, however, the Chrome team acknowledged that this is an unsatisfactory solution, and they have begun pressing for standardization in this matter. A very informative post from the Google Webmasters group recently discussed this issue, explaining:

Unfortunately, up to now it has been difficult for webmasters to ensure that Chrome and other form-filling providers can parse their form correctly. Some standards exist; but they put onerous burdens on the implementation of the website, so they’re not used much in practice.

(The "standards" they refer to is a more recent verion of the spec mentioned in Avalanchis' answer above.)

The Google post goes on to describe their proposed solution (which is met by significant criticism in the comments of the post). They propose the use of a new attribute for this purpose:

Just add an attribute to the input element, for example an email address field might look like:

<input type=”text” name=”field1” x-autocompletetype=”email” />

...where the x- stands for "experimental" and will be removed if & when this becomes a standard. Read the post for more details, or if you want to dig deeper, you will find a more complete explanation of the proposal on the whatwg wiki.

UPDATE: As pointed out in these insightful answers, all the regular expressions Chrome uses to identify/recognize common fields can be found in autofill_regex_constants.cc.utf8. So to answer the original question, just make sure the names for your html fields get matched by these expressions. Some examples include:

  • first name: "first.*name|initials|fname|first$"
  • last name: "last.*name|lname|surname|last$|secondname|family.*name"
  • email: "e.?mail"
  • address (line 1): "address.*line|address1|addr1|street"
  • zipcode: "zip|postal|post.*code|pcode|^1z$"

Tags:

Html

Google Chrome

Autofill

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