Understanding Safari AutoFill

AutoFill in Safari makes it easy to fill in fields in forms on web pages with your name, email address, passwords, credit card information and other details. You can use it more effectively if you understand where the information comes from and why it sometimes doesn't work as expected.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at Autofill in Safari. 
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So when you arrive at a webpage in Safari and there's a form there you can type all the information manually. But you could also use Safari to Autofill a lot of information. After all it doesn't make sense to keep retyping your name over and over again every time you visit a webpage. Your Mac should already know what your name is and be able to fill that in on the form asking for it. But how that works exactly depends on your Settings in Autofill and understanding how to use it. As an example let's take a simple form like this. It's simply asking for the first name, last name, and email address. Now one of the things I could do here is if I click in this field here for first name notice how there is a little button over here to the right. This icon looks like the icon you would see in the Contacts app. You can see if I look here I can select a contact and it would automatically fill that information in. As you can see here it does more than fill in this first field. It fills in all the fields where it can find a match with the information in that contact. Notice it also colors the background of those fields yellow so it indicates which field is filled in for you. This makes it easier to see what it has done and also complete other fields that it hasn't filled in.
Now another thing you can do is use the Autofill shortcut. If you look in the Edit Menu and you can see Autofill Form and it's Shift Command A. If I use Shift Command A here it fills everything in that it can find. Notice that it chose a different email address. So if I wanted something more specific it's better for me to select here and choose because my Contact actually has two different email addresses. One for home and one for work. I can choose here easily and will fill in the rest of the form. Whereas just using the shortcut is going to pick one. Now where does it get that information from? 
Well, if I go to the Contacts app and I'm going to use Spotlight to launch it and then I can look for my Contact here. You could see it has this symbol next to it. That same symbol we saw in the Autofill pop-up. This is my card. If you don't see any symbol listed here in any of your contacts you can select a card and then you can go to Card and then you can choose make this my card. Since it is already my card that's grayed out. But you want to have one card in your Contacts as you and has all your information in it and select that as your card. Now this is where it gets the information from for Autofill. You can see there's my name, and there are two email addresses. One for work and one for home. So that is why it asked me that choice there because it needed an email address to fill-in that form and needed to know which one I wanted to use. If there is a problem with the information in filling out a form it is most likely here. Make sure that your name is correct. Make sure that it is all in the proper spot, you know first name, last name like that. Make sure your email addresses are in the right spot here and labeled properly. Then some forms will even go further asking you for things like your address. So you can make sure that is good as well with each field filled in correctly.
Now in Safari, if you go to Safari Preferences and then select Autofill you'll have four checkboxes here. Make sure that using information from my Contacts is turned on else it won't look at your card in Contacts for Autofill information. There's an Edit button here that will take you right to your card if you want. But you can also get information from other sources as well. So we're going to look at these two in a minute here but there is also Other Forms. Other Forms will use variations that you manually type in. You can get a list of them here. There's nothing there right now but let's say I go here and I fill this in with something different. I fill it in like this and let's say I submit that form. Now, if I look in Safari Preferences, Autofill, and Edit Other Forms you can see this website is listed there. I could remove it if I want. But now that I have entered manual information in here if I use the Autofill Form Shortcut it fills that information in. However, instead, if I use this, a Contact here, then I can still fill-in my own information. But that won't change the saved information I have for this site. It's still going to remember that information for Autofill. So Shift Command A is still going to fill that in. But I could go ahead and change this manually and submit and now Autofill will recognize the changes that I made. 
Now what about Passwords? If you go into Preferences, Autofill, and you have User Names and Passwords checked you can click Edit here. That is just going to take you to the same place that clicking here will take you. This shows you a list of all of your Saved Passwords. This is what will be used here. So if I click in this field you could see I can select from here a Password, the one it thinks I should be using on this site due to previous experience. Or I can click Other Passwords, authenticate, and select one from here. So let me select this one from another site and it will fill that in. If I never entered anything for this at all I can do so right now and it will remember it. So I'm going to use a fake email address and a fake password and submit it. It's going to ask me if I want to save that password. I'll say yes. So now when I go here it's going to still show me this one from before because it is one I've used before. But it says Other Passwords. Now you can see it expands the list and it shows me the new one as well. So I'll say yes I want to use this one and it will fill that one in. If I go to Safari Preferences, Passwords, Authenticate and I search I can find these two right here and I can change them.
Now what about Credit Card Information. Here I've got a form that is asking for name, email address, and credit card information. So if I click in here and do the regular Autofill I can fill this in. It's only going to fill those in. So for credit card information it's going to give me a different list here. I could click here to fill this in. If I go into Preferences again credit card is checked. If I go to Edit it's going to ask me to Authenticate and I can see the credit card information here. I can select it, Remove, I can Add a new credit card and all that. Notice it never seems to fill in the Security Code for you. It's usually a 3 or 4 digit number that is easy to remember and it is a little bit of extra safety that it is only filling in that top part and it gives you this that you have to know on your own. Also notice if you go to fill-in your email address you can select one of these. If I select that notice it doesn't fill-in these fields here. It's only doing the email address. In addition notice that if you're using Hide My Email, part of iCloud+, then you can do that right here. Create a unique email address. 
I'm sure the question you're asking is why does it sometimes not work. Well, it depends on a number of factors. The biggest factor is the website itself. So here I have a form and I can see here this is first name, last name, and email address. However there is code on this page that's labeling each of these fields. This is a sample form I created so I carefully named this field First Name, this field Last Name, and this field Email Address. But there is nothing to prevent me from labeling this first field, Field 1 or Field 22 or this field xyz. In that case there would be no way for Autofill to know what goes there. It's totally up to the website developers and designers to name these properly so that Autofill works. In some cases they don't and it's frustrating but Safari really is at the mercy of how the webpage is coded. You can see how well it works here with my very simply coded webpage but then it failed a lot of times with very complex webpages. Sometimes those pages are built by developers who are building on top of libraries of other code and any problem that might happen with a certain version of Safari or all browsers or anything may be deep down there and now easy for them to fix. In some cases they intentionally block Autofill. Sometimes they do it through a misguided idea of what is better security. Other times it may be for some odd legal reasons. Who knows? But they can put code on a page or misname these purposefully or tag these fields in a certain way so that Autofill just doesn't work for them. In that case you may not be able to use Autofill at all or it may only work for some fields and not for others. It could be really frustrating.
Now in other cases you may find that some of these fields are already filled in when you load the page. What's going on there? Usually the website is remembering some information in cookies, for instance, so that it automatically fills in those form fields. So it has nothing to do with Autofill. It's coding on the webpage combined with cookies. Since we have Autofill it really doesn't matter but websites kind of do that anyway to be more convenient. So while Autofill is convenient most of the time and it works, sometimes it is not there and we have to enter the information in manually. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Understanding Safari AutoFill”

alan knight

2 years ago

auto fill does not work at all after upgrading to catalina on my imac, wish I had stayed with my old operating system.

Gary Rosenzweig

Alan: AutoFill works fine in Catalina, so that isn't your problem. It is something specific on your Mac. Experiment with these settings. If that doesn't get you anywhere, call Apple Support.

Vicki

I looked at the contacts and it appears I have about 10 contacts for myself. And I see that many people in my contacts have multiple entries too. Why would that be?

Vicki: Hard to say. You have to investigate to figure it out. Are they on different accounts, maybe (iCloud, Google, On My Mac, etc)? Or maybe you accidentally duplicated them or re-imported them from a source a while back.

Daniel Joseph

Thanks for a very informative discussion. But when you encounter a website asking for your password but the website is not coded for your password, AND you have a lengthy and complex password generated by Safari, what is the best way to enter it? It's impossible to remember -- do you have to look it up in Safari and copy and paste it?

Daniel: Yes.

Jim Goddard

Very comprehensive tutorial

Cathleen Monahan

This tutorial was very helpful. I had been trying to figure out where my data was house to change some information.Thank you for being so thorough in your clarity of description, and with the visuals to help seniors like me. Much appreciated.

Comments Closed.

Understanding Safari AutoFill

Comments: 8 Responses to “Understanding Safari AutoFill”

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