Best Form History Extensions for Chrome

Form history extensions have existed for more than a decade. Lazarus and Typio were the names most people knew, and when Firefox support for them disappeared, a small crowd of Chrome replacements appeared. Some of them are good. Several of them have problems serious enough that you should think twice.

This is not a ranked list with a winner at the top. It is a description of what separates a tool you can trust from one you cannot, followed by an honest note about where Form ReDraft sits in all of this.

First, what these tools are

A form history extension is, by design, something close to a key logger. It reads what you type into fields and keeps a copy so you can get it back later. That is the feature, and it is also the entire risk.

Judge them accordingly. A password manager asking for your passwords is unremarkable. A notes tool asking for your passwords should make you close the tab.

What separates a good tool from a bad one

Does it refuse credentials, and can that be changed?

The critical question. A good tool skips password fields, card fields and one-time code fields before it ever reads the value, and it does not let you switch that off. If refusal is a checkbox, it will eventually be unticked, including by accident.

Does it send anything anywhere?

Read the permissions and check whether there is any host permission for a domain you do not recognise. A tool that records your typing has no business talking to a server. You can confirm this by searching the extension source for fetch and XMLHttpRequest, which takes a minute and settles the question.

Does it work on modern sites?

This is where most of them quietly fail. The older tools attached listeners to named fields once, when the page loaded. That works on a traditional forum. It does not work on a page that renders its form three seconds later, a field inside a shadow root, or a rich text editor that is not a form field at all.

Test it yourself on a site you use. Type into a single page application, reload, and see whether the tool offers anything back.

Can you turn it off per site?

You will want this on your bank, on your email provider and on anything password-related. A tool that requires a full uninstall is a tool that gets uninstalled entirely, which defeats the purpose.

Can you export your data?

Storage format is a lock-in. If the tool cannot export, switching means losing every draft you have, which is a strong practical reason not to invest in it in the first place.

Does it show a fixed word count instead of a broken number?

This sounds trivial and it is not. Tools that store history as positional rows rather than labelled records will eventually show every field shifted by one column, with the content sitting in the wrong heading and every other value unreadable. If a tool has ever displayed a NaN in its history table, its storage design is unsafe and its data is already corrupt.

Common complaints, and what they really mean

Reading reviews of the established tools is instructive, because the complaints are consistent across years and products.

It stopped working after an update. Manifest V3 removed the background page in favour of a service worker that is killed when idle. Tools that held their state in a long-lived page context broke. A tool that survives this keeps its state in extension storage rather than in memory.
The pause list does not work, so it records everything. An exclusion list that silently fails is worse than none, because it teaches you to trust a control that is not there. Test it by typing into a paused site and checking the tool's own history.
It does not work on Quora. Almost always the same cause: the field is rendered late or its identifier changes on each render, so nothing on page load matched it.
The history window shows everything shifted and full of NaN. The positional storage problem above.
It saved my card number even though I said never. A real and serious defect. The fix is a filter that runs before the write and cannot be disabled, not a preference.
There is no privacy policy and it is not open source. A reasonable complaint for a tool that reads everything you type.

Where Form ReDraft sits

Form ReDraft was written with those complaints in mind, and it is fair to state plainly what it does and does not do.

It refuses credential fields with a filter that cannot be switched off, scrubs card numbers, one-time codes, private keys, tokens and high entropy strings out of ordinary text before writing, keeps everything encrypted on your own device, makes no network requests, holds no account and asks for no host permissions. It observes pages continuously rather than once at load, walks into shadow roots, handles rich text editors and re-checks single page applications after every route change. It restores through the page interface so that frameworks keep the text. It writes one labelled record per draft rather than a positional row. You can pause it per site, set retention limits, add your own patterns and export everything as JSON.

It is also free, with no paid tier, and there is a donation link rather than a subscription. Restored text arrives as plain text, so formatting is not recreated. Code editors built on Monaco are not supported. And the encryption protects your drafts from casual exposure in storage and backups, not from malware that already has access to your profile.

Read the documentation before you rely on it, and test it on the sites you actually write in.

A short checklist

Does it refuse password and card fields with no way to override that?
Can you confirm it makes no network requests?
Does it work on a single page application you use?
Does it restore text that a React or Vue field keeps after the next render?
Can you pause it on one site without uninstalling?
Can you export everything?
Does its history show field names and numbers, or columns of NaN?

A tool that fails any of the first four will let you down at the worst possible moment.

FAQ

Are form history extensions safe?

They are inherently sensitive, because the job is to remember what you type. Safety comes from refusing credentials, keeping the data on your own device and making no network requests.

Do form history extensions work with password managers?

They should stay out of the way entirely. Password fields are not form history, and a good tool refuses them before it reads the value.

Why does my form history extension not work on some sites?

Most tools watch for named fields on page load. Sites that render fields later, inside shadow roots or with fresh identifiers on every render are invisible to that approach.

Can I move my saved history to a new extension?

Only if the old tool offers an export. Look for a JSON or plain text export before you switch, because the data is usually stored in a format nothing else reads.