Mozilla: How to stop autofill/suggestions

I used to have Mozilla Firefox set up, so that when I was filling in forms, like entering my user name on Hotmail, it would not remember my past entries.

At some update stage, that setting got reset, and now whenever I’m filling in a form on the web, I see all kinds of suggestions from things I typed before. I don’t want Mozilla to remember these things, but now I can’t find where to change that.

Go to Tools

Select Clear Recent History

In Time Range to Clear select Everything

In Details select Form and Search History

Does that prevent it from remembering form information going forward?

No, it doesn’t. For that you need to go to the privacy preferences dialog (usually Edit->Preferences->Privacy) and change the “History” setting to “Use custom settings for history”. Then uncheck the box next to “Remember search and form history”.

Hmm … Now I see that the “remember search and form history” options were already unchecked. I don’t know what’s going on.

Does this happen with every website, or just certain ones? It’s entirely possible that it’s the websites themselves, not your web browser, which are autofilling the forms. They may be storing your previous entries and pre-filling the forms for you when they recognize a visit from you (via cookies).

I don’t know definitively if it happens with every website, but it sure seems like it.