Free Thinking.

The post.

  1. Stay out of my page Google…

    Posted 5 months ago and tagged as ,

    browser-bug.jpg

    A client just came back on a recent project and mentioned that his, rather prominently placed, email subscription box was adopting an obscure yellow background (instead of the white background it was supposed to have).

    So I replied and asked which browser, expecting it just to be IE6, but to my surprise he came back and informed me that it was happening in all browsers running on his XP computer. I’d already set background: #FFF on the element so knew that something in outside of the browser and my CSS was causing this.

    Now, I must admit, that my first reaction was to blame Windows XP (it’s a Microsoft product!) but then the client informed me that when he disabled Google Toolbar it went away. So some digging turned up that basically, this is how Google Toolbar indicates if it has data that can autofill a specific <input />.

    I appreciate that Google Toolbar needs a way to indicate this, but to overrule my own CSS rules was going a little far, as in this case it really did interfere with the layout. In the end, the simplest hack was to remove the term “email” from the id and name attributes of the <input />, but it would be my suggestion that Google approached this a little more intelligently and didn’t attack my CSS.

The comments.

  1. Added 5 months ago by Elliot Jay Stocks

    Here here! The exact same thing happened with me when I did the Trojan site. I think I wasted a whole day attempting to hack the CSS before realising it was Google Toolbar. *sigh*

  2. Added 4 months, 4 weeks ago by Phunky

    Heh, this is a old gripe of mine also - I once took a whole day trying to figure out the same problem only to find out it was Google Toolbar.

    This was over 5 years ago so i doubt it will change any time soon :(

    Just name you ID a little more site specific and all should be well

  3. Added 4 months, 4 weeks ago by Matthew Wood

    As a user I find the auto complete tool pretty useful, but I can see from a designer point of view how annoying it can be, still its good old Google doing what it does best!

  4. Added 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Tom

    In my mind, the situation could be improved considerably by the toolbar only highlighting when there are more than a couple of fields on the page it can auto fill. A single field hardly seems worth the time it saves.

    From my experience with it (yes, had same problem from clients and yes, spent hours trying to work out what it was lol) the toolbar is pretty clever at working out what a field might be. Not just on name, but by nearby text. This makes it even more tricky to fix. Perhaps they’ve solved this one though as it was a while ago since I last played with it.

  5. Added 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Indranil

    I actually spend a whole day trying to find out anything remotely associated with background-color on the div with google auto-complete. Complete and utter waste of time.

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