I agree with this. Outside of explicitly signaling to users that they have a saved 'draft' of the form, and having them click a button on the page to restore their filled out fields from the draft, there aren't really very many sane implementations.
Some other issues:
- doesn't work in IE
- saved data doesn't expire
- Storage keys aren't unique to the URL, so if two pages have the same exact layout, but different content, identical forms on the page will be filled out with stored information.
So it's a good concept, but I think that there are definitely some questions about user privacy, and that it needs to be paired with some extra UI cues that make it clear to the user that they're looking at draft information, and not something that's saved.
Some other issues: - doesn't work in IE - saved data doesn't expire - Storage keys aren't unique to the URL, so if two pages have the same exact layout, but different content, identical forms on the page will be filled out with stored information.
So it's a good concept, but I think that there are definitely some questions about user privacy, and that it needs to be paired with some extra UI cues that make it clear to the user that they're looking at draft information, and not something that's saved.