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Yes, password managers are way safer than copy-pasting. You don't want something as sensitive as a password in your clipboard buffer, either.
Mine clears the clipboard after 10 seconds.
Other examples are problems with lock files and file versioning (because programs tried to roll their own when the operating system didn't provide them), and the complexity of parsing "HTML soup" and emails with all kinds of bizarre invalid syntaxes.
I can't offer a general solution, but if password managers simply refused to autofill to any field other than the one with the matching standard autocomplete attribute, web developers might start doing the right thing. (Do Safari, Chrome and Edge already do this? Only they have the clout to make it happen.) The user could still fill out a text box lacking the standard autocomplete attribute by right-clicking and manually selecting the correct field. Password managers should also get cheaper because their vendors would not need armies of developers adding workarounds for popular sites.
Somehow this kind of nonsense has become culturally acceptable in the software industry. If the car industry worked this way you'd have to take your car back to the dealer once a month to be patched to take account of constantly changing fuel formulations. Standards exist for a reason.
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After learning about how every app in your PC has unfettered un monitored access to the clipboard why in gods name would you do that? I explicitly make a point to never copy any password to the clipboard!
Any password of sufficient strength would be slow and error-prone to copy manually. What’s the middle ground?
1. It uses placeholder text instead of a label. See "Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful" https://www.nngroup.com/articles/form-design-placeholders/
2. It hides the fact that the "$250/year" is actually a text box. See "Long-Term Exposure to Flat Design: How the Trend Slowly Decreases User Efficiency" https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-exposure/
3. The app makes the text box into a button plus text box. As a button, it modifies its parent widget, the radio button. This is unexpected behavior. The app would be better to show the text box after the user selects the "Founding Member" radio button. That would make the text box subordinate to the radio button and reduce user errors. See "8 Design Guidelines for Complex Applications - 6. Reduce Clutter Without Reducing Capability" https://www.nngroup.com/articles/complex-application-design/
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Gah what then? I use strong passwords but almost all of them flow through my clipboard.
Some password managers will type the username/password into the browser (through a virtual keyboard I think), not copy-paste them to protect against clipboard attacks. Eg. Keepasssc
That's one of the reasons I don't want to use 1Password and instead I'm just using old KeePass. KeePass fills what field I've selected. 1Password does its own magic and I don't like magic. KeePass might be slower, but I'm not filling those forms every day, so I can live with it. Basically KeePass does simple thing and does it well. 1Password might be good at doing complex things, but it does not have AI.
I had a similar 1Password moment. I was buying airline tickets; entered my name, my wife’s name, address, declined insurance, declined hotel offer, scroll scroll scroll... Then I let 1Password fill in my payment details, which it did perfectly fine. But... what it ALSO did, on a field now well off the top of the screen, was change my wife’s first name to my full name. I caught this when I got the confirmation email.…
This is an example of a common antipattern in software: some piece of software fails to correctly implement something (here, modern HTML autocomplete="cc-exp-year"), and another piece of software goes through all kinds of contortions to work with incorrect or incomplete implementations with the result that it now behaves undesirably with a third piece of software. Specifically, 1Password has to do complicated guesses…