HN's login page and password manager autofill issue

Question

https://news.ycombinator.com/loginMy password manager can't tell the difference between the login username text box and the new account username text box.. It fills in both, then sends an enter command, activating the button for new account.I am a tester, not a developer, but I observed that the name id on both text boxes are the same. Maybe change the new account username form "name" to "new-acct-username" and the password managers might handle it better?

Tomte · Accepted Answer

Nobody here can do anything about it. Write hn@ycombinator.com. You'll get a reply. The admin is quite responsive to email.

Someone1234 · Answer

I can see how any password manager would get confused with the HTML of that page. Identically named username/password for create/login, but just happen to be in two different forms with a label to distinguish them. There's no way to determine what is what.
It may be fixable via:
- Set the autocomplete="current-password" and autocomplete="new-password" respectively (this is standard[0]).
May help a password manager figure out what is going on. Unfortunately there's nothing standard like that for username or the login button (maybe there should be?).
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...

xwowsersx · Answer

I have noticed this on mobile in Chrome with both LastPass and 1Password where it will either only fill in the password for the login and not the username or it will fill the create account section. However, on Firefox desktop, 1Password seems to handle it just fine: https://streamable.com/3y5ikuThese autofills never work perfectly IME. One thing that helps is to turn off having it try to automatically send the enter key and, instead, just allow it to fill the inputs so you can check that everything looks correct before you click to login.

dpifke · Answer

A tag on that page would also go a long ways towards making it password manager friendly.

nathanaldensr · Answer

Works fine in Firefox on Android with Bitwarden.

phnofive · Answer

I'm seeing the IDs as acct and pw.

ComputerGuru · Answer

What kind of password manager are you using that freely puts passwords in regular ( or unmasked) text input boxes?Edit: typo