DevTools Autofill Errors in Electron: What They Are and How to Fix Them

When running an Electron app with DevTools open, you may encounter the following warnings:

      [65260:0807/105754.978:ERROR:CONSOLE:1] "Request Autofill.enable failed. {"code":-32601,"message":"'Autofill.enable' wasn't found"}", source: devtools://devtools/bundled/core/protocol_client/protocol_client.js (1)
[65260:0807/105754.978:ERROR:CONSOLE:1] "Request Autofill.setAddresses failed. {"code":-32601,"message":"'Autofill.setAddresses' wasn't found"}", source: devtools://devtools/bundled/core/protocol_client/protocol_client.js (1)
    

These messages don’t come from your code. Instead, they originate from Chrome DevTools attempting to call internal debugging APIs — APIs that are not supported in Electron’s version of Chromium.

🧠 Why This Happens in Electron

Electron provides DevTools via Chromium, but not all internal Chrome DevTools Protocol methods are available. Features like Autofill.enable or Autofill.setAddresses are only supported in full Chrome builds, not in Electron’s stripped-down implementation.

These warnings typically appear:

• In development environments
• In Electron versions 30 and newer
• When DevTools experiments or panels attempt to inspect autofill or form data

✅ How to Fix or Suppress in Electron

1. Disable Experimental DevTools Features

To suppress the warnings:

1. Open DevTools (F12 or Cmd+Opt+I)
2. Click the ⚙️ Settings icon
3. Navigate to Experiments
4. Uncheck anything related to Autofill or form debugging
5. Restart DevTools

2. Ignore the Warnings

If you aren’t working with autofill logic, these messages are harmless. You can safely ignore them.

3. Track Electron’s DevTools Compatibility

Electron doesn’t allow direct modification of DevTools internals, so it’s not currently possible to disable specific protocol methods like Autofill.enable at runtime.

Monitor the Electron GitHub issues for discussions and future support.

🧪 Developer Notes

• These warnings do not affect IPC or Electron’s main/renderer process interaction.
• They are unrelated to application functionality.
• They can appear randomly depending on DevTools experiments, Chrome updates, or plugins.

🧼 Summary

If you see this error, your app is not broken — Electron DevTools is just being noisy.

No changes to your code are required unless you’re actively working with Chrome Autofill APIs (which most apps are not).