To avoid loss of form input, there are several auto-save-to-localstorage solutions like http://garlicjs.org/. Just add data-persist="garlic" to the form tag and everything is saved until successfully submitted.
Which is also potentially annoying behaviour - often you don't want the state to be saved. We could solve it adding a 'reset' button to our forms. Haha - do browsers still support those?
Has it actually annoyed you or have you heard of someone being annoyed by it? Because I can't imagine it being annoying. Most of the time, saving form input is desired. The few times where it's not, it's easily solved by one of the many ways to remove all the text.
It has, yeah. Wasn't it behaviour added to Firefox once some years ago? I recall a situation where my less technical other half was struggling to submit a form because of this behaviour. Granted, it was due to a poor implemention that didn't support two dropdowns where one depended on the other, but it was confusing and annoying.
As a developer it's annoying because it slows down testing - again edge case, but I've seen it before, and it annoyed me.
If it was the standard behaviour and all controls were sensitive to it, that would probably be different.
There's also the security aspect to keep in mind. So now when someone comes back to a page on your machine, might they see something you didn't want them to see?
