In the IT world, you never know what weird bugs are going to pop up. In March, for example, an Apple user named Rachel True said she couldn’t log into her iCloud account, and the culprit turned out to be her name. “True” and “false” are commonly used in the program’s code to determine whether it is true or false, and the reason she was unable to log in was that Apple’s iCloud system automatically ignored the “true” in her name.

Recently, another similar bug appeared. This time, though, the problem is in Safari.

GitHub user Quarterdeck noticed a strange phenomenon when using Safari: When a page’s p tag contains the word “Welcome Back”, it triggers an autopopulate of the user name and password.

After much trial and error, he thinks the reason for this is that Safari assumes that all pages with “Welcome Back” are login pages, which triggers the user name and password to fill in automatically.

What’s the solution? He found that by simply adding a continuous space between the words Welcome and Back, Safari prevented this behavior.

<p>welcome&nbsp; back</p>

Another user, LaurensGroeneveld, reproduced the bug and found an alternative solution: adding style=”display: none; .

Others have found that “Sign In” has the same effect:

The phenomenon has been hotly debated online.

Is everything the browser?

The browser provides a “remember password” feature to fill in automatically the next time the user uses it. In many cases this feature does provide convenience, but there are a number of issues associated with it, such as security, false triggers, and so on.

This isn’t unique to Safari. Every password manager he or she has used uses a heuristic to determine if a field needs to be filled in automatically.

Others said the user, not the website, should be the one to decide whether to display the autopopulate.

The question also led to a discussion of several popular browsers:

It looks like Safari is “contemporary” IE.

No, Chrome is the new IE.

Both are the new IE. One pushes new features without regard to the rest of the ecosystem, and the other refuses to implement standards without regard to the rest of the ecosystem. So I think both are new IE, just in different stages.

I’m afraid IE browser saw this, can only tearfully say “ready to retire, don’t cue”…

Reference link:

  • https://github.com/livewire-u…
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/…