Disable browser 'Save Password' functionality

Question

One of the joys of working for a government healthcare agency is having to deal with all of the paranoia around dealing with PHI (Protected Health Information). Don\'t get m

Answer 1

I had been struggling with this problem a while, with a unique twist to the problem. Privileged users couldn't have the saved passwords work for them, but normal users needed it. This meant privileged users had to log in twice, the second time enforcing no saved passwords.

With this requirement, the standard autocomplete="off" method doesn't work across all browsers, because the password may have been saved from the first login. A colleague found a solution to replace the password field when it was focused with a new password field, and then focus on the new password field (then hook up the same event handler). This worked (except it caused an infinite loop in IE6). Maybe there was a way around that, but it was causing me a migraine.

Finally, I tried to just have the username and password outside of the form. To my surprise, this worked! It worked on IE6, and current versions of Firefox and Chrome on Linux. I haven't tested it further, but I suspect it works in most if not all browsers (but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a browser out there that didn't care if there was no form).

Here is some sample code, along with some jQuery to get it to work: