Phone numbers saved as part of addresses for autofill
Is there any way to stop Firefox from adding the +1 to every US phone number saved as part of addresses used for autofill?
I never enter the +1 but Firefox keeps adding it no matter how many times I remove it.
Yes, I know that +1 is the country code for the US and most of North America. BUT no one in the area actually uses the +1 country code. More importantly so far as autofill is concerned, I have never found any online form that needs the +1, but I have found numerous online forms that cannot accept the +1 that Firefox keeps adding as a prefix.
I'm sure there are some websites run by international businesses somewhere that want the country code; but I am in the United States (along with most Firefox users) and the vast majority of websites were I use autofill to fill in forms are in the United States. All these websites expect a 10 digit phone number without any country code. A very few of them will accept the 12 character phone number that Firefox insists on entering, most do not. Some strip off the + as a non-numeric character, some reject the entry completely because it includes the non-numeric character; some reject the entire entry because it contained more than 10 digits; some save only the first 10 characters or digits; BUT ALMOST NONE recognize and accept the 12 characters that Firefox sends as a phone number!
All Replies (5)
Let me also note that another user asked this same question two months ago -- four users quickly signed up as having the same problem. NO ONE offered any solutions or even any thoughts about a work around. Then our beloved overseers archived the question - apparently in recognition of the fact that there IS NO SOLUTION to this problem other than using a different browser (no other common browser shares this problem)
If I search Bugzilla for phone numbers then this looks like a complicated subject.
There is either that there is currently still only support for US phone numbers and otherwise the tendency to use E.164 recommendations and there is not much progress.
There seem to be two fields: tel and tel-national for phone nmubers.
Some bug that you can read:
- Bug 1474920 - Saving a phone number will add "+1" prefix by default
- Bug 1405486 - [Form Autofill] Allow me to specify the format for phone numbers
- Bug 1407545 - [Form Autofill] Determine the default `tel` value based on the countries of the web site and user.
- Bug 1413118 - [Form Autofill] Fill "tel-national" to a recognized "tel" field even the international format passes "maxlength" [58]
Please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html
You can vote for a bug to show your interest
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=voting.html
So the problem has been known for over two years with absolutely zero attempts to resolve it.
And people wonder why Firefox is losing users.
While Firefox remains an almost decent basic browser, it has fallen woefully behind in modern features, especially in the area of autofill and autocomplete which are both about a decade outdated.
Firefox mangles every phone number saved for autofill -- and at least some of the developers are saying that this is the correct behavior and that all other browsers are wrong.
Firefox autofill completely fails to recognize nearly half of the online forms it encounters and either fails to recognize or incorrectly recognizes some fields on other forms. These issues have been reported repeatedly but have also had absolutely zero improvement in at least two years.
Maybe use an extension for form fill and not the Firefox autofill feature.
- Autofill https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/autofill-quantum/
- AutoFill Forms (WebExtension) https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/autofill-forms-e10s/
Thanks for the suggestion but if I'm going to load more software and add more steps to the process I can just run a browser that actually works, such as Chrome, Edge, or Opera, all of which have autofill that works much more reliably and none of which deliberately change the data I saved.
I've been using Firefox for a long time and I like a lot about how it works, but just about everything related to autofill is a disaster.