[jefftk]

My parent was saying Chrome was not compliant with the spec, but SHOULD directives are not mandatory and a User Agent may decide that it would be a worse experience for users to follow them.

Chrome is claiming that enough developers have marked fields as autocomplete=off in user-hostile ways that it shouldn't be respected, while many people here are making the case that conflicts with site-provided autocomplete and other issues push the other direction. That's how to have this discussion, not by pretending this SHOULD is a MUST.

(I don't work on Chrome and don't know any Google-internal anything about this)