Chrome copied many features from Opera (the old Opera) I'm still surprised why they decided not to copy Wand (by default the browser does not populate any fields unless you click on the wand button or use keyboard shortcut).
This works so much better than the behavior other browsers use.
What's more of a surprise is that there's a browser that has such a clumsy sounding feature as this "wand". Only power users are going to bother clicking a button just to help them fill in a form, or even know that's what the button does in the first place. That kind of manually activated feature seems to be completely against Chrome's style of minimalist UI, and for good reason, it will be one more confusing button for 90% of users to look at every day and be reminded that computers are complicated.
I wouldn't bother trying to work out some weird button, I'd just manually type my details again and again into every form and feel annoyed that the browser isn't remembering them like other browsers do.
Only power users are going to bother clicking a button just to help them fill in a form, or even know that's what the button does in the first place.
This is an interesting observation. I never used the "wand" function in Opera because, partly, it's named in such a way as to not appeal to power users at all. The name "wand" says "do something magically". Agreed that "wand" doesn't indicate what it does, which is another reason to shy away from it. It's such a generic term as to be useless. Literally anything could be behind the "magic" operation.
I don't care about name, just the functionality. It could be called Secure Login, Autocomplete or other things. As long as it works correctly.
Another thing I forgot to mention which is quite important. It works well when your password store is encrypted. It allows browser to ask you for your master password when you are trying to log in to the page, not when you happen to visit page that password is stored. This makes feasible to use configuration where the password is forgotten either immediatelly or after few minutes. Having encrypted password store in FF or Chrome and not storing the password all the time in memory is essentially unusable.
Well I typically used Ctrl+Enter and it filled the forms, if it was a login prompt it automatically logged me in.
Not sure about the newbie argument, yes it might be like that in the beginning, but you won't stay newbie forever you learn things. Also I'm not buying the minimalist argument, Chrome currently is one of biggest resource hogs among browsers.
Anyway at least provide option to enable such behavior. On Firefox I use Secure Login extension to emulate that, but it doesn't work as well as Wand did.
This works so much better than the behavior other browsers use.