Bug With Firefox - Disabled Attribute of Input Not Resetting When Refreshing

I've found what I believe to be a bug with Firefox and I'm wondering if this actually is a bug, as well as any workarounds for this.

If you create a basic webpage with the following source:

<html>
  <head>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div>
      <input id="txtTest" type="text" />
      <input type="button" onclick="$('#txtTest').attr('disabled','disabled');" value="Set Disabled (jQuery)" />
      <input type="button" onclick="document.getElementById('txtTest').disabled = true;" value="Set Disabled (js)" />
      <input type="button" onclick="$('#txtTest').removeAttr('disabled');" value="Remove Disabled" />
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

If you disable the textbox dynamically and then refresh the page, the textbox will remain disabled instead of resetting back to its original state of not disabled. I've tried this in IE8 and Chrome and those behave as I would expect, resetting the textbox back to not disabled when I refresh.

Another interesting bit of information is that it still does the same thing if the input is a checkbox instead of a textbox.

This is a "feature" of Firefox which remembers form input values across page refreshes. To fix this behavior, you simply set autocomplete="off" on the form containing the inputs, or just directly to the input.

This stops autocomplete from working and prevents the browser from remembering the state of input fields.

Alternatively, you can just "hard-refresh" by clicking CTRL+F5. This will completely reset the current page.

To deal with the back button, do this (from here)

    window.addEventListener('pageshow', PageShowHandler, false);
    window.addEventListener('unload', UnloadHandler, false);

    function PageShowHandler() {
        window.addEventListener('unload', UnloadHandler, false);
    }

    function UnloadHandler() {
        //enable button here
        window.removeEventListener('unload', UnloadHandler, false);
    }

As mentioned before you need to add autocomplete="off" to your buttons.

Here is a sh+perl snippet to automate this in the case of <button>s in your HTML files/templates (under some assumptions):

find /path/to/html/templates -type f -name '*.html' -exec perl -pi -e \
  's/(?<=<button )(.*?)(?=>)/@{[(index($1,"autocomplete=")!=-1?"$1":"$1 autocomplete=\"off\"")]}/g' \
  {} +

The assumptions are:

Opening <button> tags begin and end on the same line. If this is not the case (i.e. they might be split over several lines) then replacing /g with /gs should help (the s modifier causes . to match newlines as well)
Valid HTML (e.g. there are no funny characters between < and >) and no unescaped greater than (>) inside the opening tag.

This is indeed an open bug in Firefox. There is also a note in MDN: autocomplete (scroll down to the second yellow box):

Note: The autocomplete attribute also controls whether Firefox will — unlike other browsers — persist the dynamic disabled state and (if applicable) dynamic checkedness of an <input> element, <textarea> element, or entire <form> across page loads. The persistence feature is enabled by default. Setting the value of the autocomplete attribute to off disables this feature. This works even when the autocomplete attribute would normally not apply by virtue of its type. See bug 654072.

If you are using Bootstrap, you might be interested in the

comment on the bug report by a Bootstrap team member
bug report in the Bootstrap repository
note in the Bootstrap documentation

Bug With Firefox - Disabled Attribute of Input Not Resetting When Refreshing

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