Autofill forms

An unusual page for a search engine: how to make browser autofill work on your forms. Yandex includes it because it has measured the result — order conversion is 5–10% higher on sites where autofill works correctly.

The diagnostic that saves time

Yandex states it plainly: if autofill does not work in Yandex Browser, it probably will not work in other browsers either. The recognition heuristics are broadly similar, so one browser is a reasonable proxy for all of them.

The markup rules

• The form must meet HTML standards.
• Inputs need an autocomplete attribute with a valid value — given-name, email and so on.
• Inputs must be children of a form element.
• Attributes must be intuitive: first_name, fname, given_name for a first name; phone, tel, telephone for a number; org, company for an organisation.
• label for= must point unambiguously at its input.

Yandex’s counter-example is instructive: id="xdia_13" is unrecognisable; name="mail address" is ambiguous between email and postal address; a textarea with placeholder “Address” could be email, delivery address or website.

Form submission, which is the subtle half

The browser saves entered data only if it can tell the form was submitted. The reliable signal is a form element containing an input type="submit". Without them, the browser falls back on heuristics — watching navigation, AJAX requests, removed iframes, hidden fields — which Yandex admits sometimes trigger falsely and save incorrect data. A div styled as a button and wired to JavaScript is the pattern that breaks this.

Disabling it

Any invalid autocomplete value disables autofill — none, nope, anything arbitrary. Yandex does not guarantee it works everywhere, and asks sites with broken autofill to contact its browser team rather than switch it off.