How can I avoid browser prepopulating fields in my registration form?

Question

autocomplete="off" is not what I am after. Basically, on my registration form there are fields "phone" and "password" placed one above the other. (see screenshot)

The "phone" field gets, annoyingly, prepopulated with a username, as I guess what the browser is doing - the browser finds a field of type password and assumes the text input field just before it is a username field. The effect is this:

Why I am not interested in the non-standard autocomplete attribute for the phone field, is that I do want user to be able to fill this form as easily as possible and if they have previously entered their phone number on other sites (into fields called "phone") they could benefit from this showing up as they start typing into the field. That's why I don't want to turn autocomplete off altogether.

I was thinking more in the direction of reorganizing the fields somehow to avoid this behaviour. Or some way of telling the browser that the field above the password field has nothing to do with it, or that the password field is not used for authentication purposes. Somehow mark it as that. Or inject some invisible element inbetween these two fields?

Any ideas?

Markup used:

<input id="phone" name="phone" type="text" value="" maxlength="30">
<input id="newPassword" name="newPassword" type="password" value="" maxlength="20">

I am getting this behaviour on Chrome, FF, (not sure about IE, got an archaic version of that on my machine, don't even want to start worrying about IE yet.)

Answer 1

Most password managers will search the first password field, and the closest text field before it.

So all you have to do is add invisible text and password fields (display:none) above "new password".

Firefox tries to interpret 3 password fields as a "change password" action, so if you don't want that you should be safe adding yet another invisible password field.