When are forms autofilled in Chrome?

Question

I'm confused about how Chrome decides what forms to autofill. By autofill I mean the inputs are highlighted in yellow and already completely filled in when you land on the page (see picture below). I do not mean autocomplete which is where the input is blank and you get a suggestion only when you start typing in it.

Here's the autofill rules as I understand them:

1. If your form is located on its own url, e.g., http://mysite.com/login
2. Your form is present on page load and is NOT loaded via ajax

Comparing my site with Dropbox's we both have a login page: http://localhost/login vs. https://www.dropbox.com/login which satisfies rule #1. The login form gets autofilled for both of us.

My problem is with rule #2. On Dropbox's homepage, www.dropbox.com, they have a "sign in" modal (see picture below) that gets autofilled. On my homepage, http://localhost, I have an identical modal which does NOT ever get autofilled.

I can't figure what the deal is here, can someone chime in? Is it just a localhost vs. real URL issue? If so, how do you explain why http://localhost/login gets autofilled?

Answer 1

When you log into a new site chrome will drop down its notification bar at the top and ask you if you want to save the password, if you tell it "Never" it wont ask again and it wont ever autofill

To get form fields to autofill like street, address, etc, a good answer by kmote

How to trigger Autofill in Google Chrome?,