Ugly yellow form fields

Once again someone asked on CSS-D why MSIE shows some horribly yellow text boxes, and how to work around that.

The riddle is easily solved – the google toolbar highlights form fields that can be automatically filled with data you entered earlier and shades them yellow.

Patrick Griffiths reported on that some year ago, and of course there is a developer who came up with a JavaScript workaround to suppress this functionality.

Personally, I think it is a nice to have feature. It was bad practise of google to not make it more obvious that the toolbar causes these changes and explain what they mean. However, the amount of work some developers put into trying to control the UI as much as possible with web client technologies just makes me snigger.

Wake up, smell the coffee. Yes, you might know a lot about usability and you can design well, but it is the user’s choice to install the toolbar, and live with its features – or turn them off. The colouring has a reason, it is not done because google like yellow.