Today’s problem came as a result of a Firefox anomaly. It’s one of those problems that comes up after launching because we were too lax in testing. Here’s how it broke down, without going into great detail about the application.
We’re building a CRM that stores asks and closes of our sales reps. The application shows recent asks and closes on the main screen, with the ability for the user to update said activities. The update option are in input fields, named the same, and updated via javascript behind the scenes.
When adding a new activity, the application inserts that entry into the table of current asks and closes. On reload, Firefox was showing old data in those fields, but if the user clicked on a different page and came back to the dashboard, they would see the correct data. Upon inspection, the value of the input was correct. Meaning the browser was replacing the input with what it believed to be good data.
Unfortunately this bug wasn’t caught until production. The answer was simple. We only needed to turn off autocomplete on each of the inputs. This immediately solved the problem.
autocomplete=off
Add that line to the input and the problem disappeared.