Computer automatically populating web page fields
Just hoping that someone may be able to point me in the right direction.
I work in the IT industry and like most others in this industry, routinely get asked questions by friends / relatives etc. who assume that "working in IT" means knowing everything from how to program the space shuttle to how to rebuild a supercray from a meccano set! A friend asked me a question which I'm a little stumped on however.
He shares a house with 3 others and there is a computer that they all use. He has shown me how on numerous websites that placing the cursor in particular fields brings up various options - especially user account names, emaill addresses, etc. For example, when using Hotmail, clicking in the username field brings up a dropdown list of account names of people who have used hotmail on the same computer. Likewise, when he goes to send an email, clicking in the "to" field brings up a list of all email addresses that have been previously written to.
My first thought was cookies and I started to explain what cookies are and how they work - went to show him how to delete them, etc. We even re-booted the computer. So of course I was quite surprised to find the drop down boxes still appearing with all the details! Some of the other websites that he uses also have similar fields like user names or user ids which give a dropdown list to choose from. Some of these user id's are not even related to the particular website that he is browsing.
Because of the shared nature of the computer he doesn't want to have visibility of these drop-down values to the other users and hence is rather curious on how to disable this function. I haven't been able to help him so thought I would ask this minefield of information on PPRuNe.
The computer is using Windows ME and the web browser is IE 5.5 - a colleague told me that an auto complete function comes with this version but I turned that off and yet the problem still appears.
If anyone has any ideas that I can pass on, we would both be very appreciative.
Thanking you,