Why do browsers waste my time?
We have all done it: we fill in a form on a Web site, we click OK and the Web site trashes all the information we just spent up to an hour working on.
Why do Web sites think that this is OK? This week I have filled in several web forms that required lengthy chunks of descriptive text that for some reason thought it was ok to just trash all my effort and repeat it because something was not exactly right.
Web browsers have remembered passwords for years. We have history files. But none of the major browsers can be configured to automatically keep track of all form data as it is entered. There is a Firefox form saver that allows you to elect to save a page and somewhat interestingly an experimental project that has been started by Ka-Ping Yee who folk in the security usability community know from his principles of usability.
Not trashing user effort should be considered a key usability requirement. But besides that I would like to have a permanent record of every form that I have entered at every site in a verifiable archive. While there might be people who would not want their activities to be tracked at certain sites this is already an issue with the history mechanism and something that can and should be fixed in any case. There should be a button that you can click to tell the browser not to track or record any interactions at that site.
