[jessemillar]

> With this update, Firefox is introducing scroll anchoring, which ensures that you’re not going to bounce around on the page as these slow-loading ads load.

While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.

[brink]

Same. Have you ever tried to click a link only to accidentally click something else because the page won't stop loading? It's infuriating.

[airstrike]

This happens to me every single day on the Windows 10 start menu and on my iPhone using the swipe-down search on the Home screen.

Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me, and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more maddening

I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a moment to show up and when I went to click it, the web results populated so I accidentally clicked on "arroz con gandules". Sounds lovely, but I am certainly not expecting that to be the autocomplete...

[Scramblejams]

Had the same problem on my iPhone. I turned off Siri for app search (Settings / Siri & Search / Suggestions for Search) and now the results are instant. (And local to my phone, so no internet-sourced results, but I’m fine with that.)

How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing. I had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it impossible to launch apps from the Start Menu’s search results. Even though I disabled Cortana. Incredible.

[jodrellblank]

How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing.

My Windows 10 start menu lags. Press windows key or click on it, no response for a good ten seconds or more.

I have this on my work machine, a previous install, my home machine, a Surface Book, a remote desktop server on Windows 2016.

And yet, I've never seen anyone else talking about it. I can't believe I'm the only one who has this "my start menu has paged out to 5400rpm disk, then powered the disk down" experience.

[Scramblejams]

Same here. Sometimes I’ll click on it a good five or eight times before it comes up. When people say Windows 10 is good, I feel like they’re living in an alternate dimension.

[naikrovek]

I think you guys are the exceptions to the norm here, and not the norm.

I have too many computers at home, some verrry slow ones, and they all pop up the start menu within a second or two unless I've just booted the PC.

I work with a lot of people who use Windows 10 all day long, and I've never heard one of them ever complain about a slow start menu. Complaints about search results? Absolutely.

I suspect it's something you're installing, and I'm sure you'll deny that (and you very well could be right, I don't know) and these things are time consuming to diagnose, unfortunately.

[filoleg]

Thank you for the Siri protip, that was one of my biggest frustrations with iOS (that + inability to take scrolling screenshots natively, similarly to how you can on Samsung Galaxy phones). For complete peace, I just wish there was a way to turn off all app suggestions in search at once, instead of flipping that switch in settings for every single app.

[TheKarateKid]

> I had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it impossible to launch apps from the Start Menu’s search results.

Microsoft is actually uncoupling Cortana to Windows Search/Start Menu in the next major release, so this should be less of a problem.

[airstrike]

Try slowly typing in "Performance" in the Windows 10 start menu and watch the top result flip around pretty much at each key press...

[noglorp]

Better yet is when you type "Ar" looking for "Arrow" and get

1) Arrow

2) Arboles

3) Area

And then type another 'r' before you realize your result is there ("Arr") and as you go to select "Arrow" the auto-suggest results turn into

1) Array

2) Arrogant

3) Arrow

Like, how does adding the second 'r' make "Array" higher probability than "Arrow"?!

[krispbyte]

Every time I click the share button in Android, the icons are in completely different order. Not last recently used, not alphabetically. Completely random.

[brokenmachine]

Lol, I've noticed this as well.

Also it seems to use a very slow random number generator because it always takes a long time to populate the random list.

So stupid.

[smallbigfish]

That will teach you to pay attention. Heh!

[msravi]

Your not accepting the 1st suggestion (Arrow) when you typed "Ar" decreased the probability that that was the term you intended. The next suggestion factored in that you were probably looking for something else and bumped up other suggestions.

[arlens]

That’s a bad assumption. People often type faster than they can respond to changes on screen. Typing speed & muscle memory means I’m more likely to type “arr” than just “ar”. But I’m also likely to be thrown off by the search reshuffling as it expands.

Once an item matches the search, it should stay in place unless it’s invalidated by further typing. Reshuffling just adds needless friction.

[krageon]

This actually made me laugh with how tone-deaf it appears to be about how users normally interact with a search field. Is this response based on industry "knowledge"? How did this sort of thinking come about?

[sandov]

That would be such a stupid way to implement a search.

When you search you don't type letter by letter and inspect the suggestions after each keystroke. You type many letters and only then you inspect the suggestions/results.

[baroffoos]

Machine learning

[airstrike]

I can relate to this so much... It's just egregiously bad design

[codebolt]

The iPhone search has been driving me crazy as well. Another one that always gets me is pressing a number in the recent calls list just after another call was ended.

[airstrike]

You're absolutely right. The recent calls issue happens way too often. Nothing worse than calling your boss at 2am when you meant to call your wife or vice-versa...

[Razengan]

This has happened too many times to me.

I often put the phone in my pocket after a call without pressing the sleep button, so the screen stays active, causing me to unknowingly "butt dial" random numbers, sometimes talking to other people while a confused/mischievous person on the call is listening in...

[EGreg]

On iOS I randomly get this weird lag when I swipe down and start typing an app name. Sometimes it shows LOCAL apps and sometimes it... doesn't. For a while. WHY, Apple, WHY? You used to "JUST WORK"

[btrettel]

On Android, whenever I want to copy something I have to wait a few seconds for the menu to fully load. Otherwise I end up tapping on the wrong icon. Quite irritating.

[gitgud]

This is a good argument for empty place holders when loading dynamic content. Although some people don't like them, it is an easy way to prevent UX issues like this.

[megy]

The solution is not to obey the click of the content change 0.1 seconds before the click.

[dahfizz]

I disagree. I think having some clicks ignored would be pretty annoying. The solution is to design your UI so that what people want to click on isn't jumping around.

[usrusr]

I'm pretty sure that A/B-testing shows an increase in ad engagement. Clearly, jumpy layouts must put users in a more positive, open mindset!

[iforgotpassword]

Oh my god. Sad thing is that I'm almost sure that mist have happened somewhere. Not that they came to the "jumpy layout is good" conclusion, but that maybe an accidentally slower version of the page lead to that result and they ended up with "hey this version makes users want to click ads more"!

[erichurkman]

Or all of the sites that have adopted a 'card' view. Gannett sites all have this terrible UX that if you click in the white space around an article, it closes the article and takes you to the home page. [0] Accidental clicks on white space shouldn't do anything!

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/tourney/2019/03/...

[CamperBob2]

Accidental clicks on white space shouldn't do anything!

They are racking up click-throughs.

Advertisers pay just as much for accidental clicks as intentional ones, so the site operator is incentivized to generate as many as possible. Being the dumbest morons ever to mo a ron, the advertisers don't understand that they're the marks in this particular con game.

Eventually they will get tired of paying for worthless clicks, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

[krispbyte]

>Eventually they will get tired of paying for worthless clicks

They'll just start paying less per click. A worse outcome for everyone, not just the bad players.

[mushufasa]

this has been happening to me recently on Google search, as cards load with info about the top results.

Anyone on Google reading this -- please either cut that out, or include css placeholders for content you expect your JS to load.

Both waiting longer for content to load and having to go back from clicking the wrong thing detract from the raison d'etre of fast and relevant search.

[jordwest]

I was hoping to find someone else who mentioned this.

This catches me out regularly. I would not be surprised if a team at Google implemented this and immediately saw “increased engagement” from users in an AB test, so they locked it in permanently and considered it case closed, the science is in.

Scientism at its worst.

[mort96]

I'm constantly annoyed by that horrible feature too. It usually doesn't cause a misclick anymore, but it's really annoying that every time I go back to look a the next search result, the result moves once I've moved my cursor to the result I want to click.

[dorgo]

I think I solved it by removing it in stylus:

#eobc_1,.r-i4KASL__ToPM,.r-iGs8q6iiSUas{ display:none !important; }

I think it was something like "other people also search for..." thing which poped up unexepectedly.

[apk-d]

Is there any use in removing these automatically-generated tags? They seem like something that might change the second Google's deployment pipeline pushes a new build (or even sooner).

[anoncake]

Ublock origin has the :has and :xpath operators for cases like this.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...

[itchyjunk]

Do you mean like this? [0]

[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY

[brownbat]

That whole series provided some great anti-patterns:

https://imgur.com/gallery/YU6EA

[SomeHacker44]

Using the NYT iPhone app on the subway is maddening. Every time you go in and out of cell coverage the whole app pauses while it waits to load ads that will never come. It is so frustrating that I am close to giving up on it entirely.

[linsomniac]

Newegg has been particularly bad with this in the past. Looks like they have fixed it now, but used to be that it would take a 0.5-2 seconds for their advertisement to load above the "search within", "only show newegg products, I'm not looking for an amazon experience", and "sort by" fields. Go to click on those (I always prefer "only newegg" instead of the default "all sellers"), and half the time I'd end up clicking on the advertisement when it loaded.

Makes me wish there was some sort of an understanding that: The thing I just clicked was somewhere else within the last 400ms, so click on what used to be there."

[swebs]

>and half the time I'd end up clicking on the advertisement when it loaded.

Just as planned

[dTal]

I don't think it's likely to have been "planned" deliberately, as the result is an annoyed user. I think it's the result of naive A/B testing, without examining the deeper reasons for the results. "Oh wow, clicks are up 50% with the new layout!"

Of course, if you did discover the true reason for the increase in your click rates, you'd probably stay quiet about it. So maybe it's a bit of both.

[megy]

It might be the result of developing it on a fast internet connection in the office where the ad loads up straight away.

[benj111]

To be fair I find it with the web in general.

That site that you're about to reload because it isn't doing anything? Suddenly loads just as your finger is depressing the mouse button to reload. That JavaScript heavy site that has brought your pc to its knees? Works just as you've elected to kill the process.

I assume its a variant of Sods Law.

[anoncake]

> That site that you're about to reload because it isn't doing anything? Suddenly loads just as your finger is depressing the mouse button to reload.

I dont think thats coincidence. More likely, the browser already has downloaded the page itself but is waiting for some resource before rendering it. If you reload, it renders what it has immediately.

[linsomniac]

How does it know my finger is swiftly moving towards the "R" part of ctl-shift-R? :-) I swear that I sometimes see it render right as my finger is getting ready to contact R.

[copperx]

> I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.

If we could get this feature on mobile and desktop operating systems, I would be soo happy. I probably click/tap on something just before it moves about fifty times a day. Having the fastest devices only helps a little.

[pmoriarty]

A similar annoyance: the browser insisting on switching focus once the page loads.

It happens nearly daily that I'll be typing in to an input field while the page is still loading, and Firefox will switch focus away from that input field when the page finishes loading.

The consequences of this are even worse for me, as I use the Tridactyl extension, which acts on vim-keystrokes when the focus is not in an input field. So if I'm in the middle of typing something in an input field and Firefox in its infinite wisdom chooses to switch focus out of the input field, what I type from then on will be acted on as commands to Tridactyl, which could do things like open, close, or reload a page.

Super, super annoying!

[beatgammit]

That's actually the reason I stopped using VIM bindings in FF. The small amount of niceness from VIM bindings did not make up for the random annoyances.

[bovine3dom]

Have you tried `set allowautofocus false`? It breaks some fancy editors like CodeMirror but you can always re-enable it on certain pages with `seturl`.

[brokenmachine]

I'm on Windows 7 and losing focus is a continuous annoyance.

I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard.

[mstade]

> I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.

This has been my #1 gripe with web sites since pretty much the dawn of time. Finally!

[dpcan]

It appears to already be in Chrome. I have a site that I hate because their slider at the top always scrolls the site around, but that has recently stopped, and I've noticed that the page knows where I've scrolled to and adjust the scroll when the page changes above where I'm reading.

[Razengan]

It's one of those features that you'd think must be inherent in everything since forever but can't believe that we still don't have it by now.

[organsnyder]

I switched back to Firefox about six months ago, and this issue was the only thing that ever made me consider switching back to Chrome; there's one forum I frequent where the "latest unread post" button was basically useless because of this.

[miohtama]

Excellent news! Next step: TWitter and Facebook streams do not reorganize themselves by an algorithm on a Back button. You can click Back and comment the post that gave you the linked article in the first place.

[StavrosK]

I don't know what this is, but I recently got an option on the Twitter mobile site to sort the feed latest-first. I wonder if that's some A/B test.

[rayiner]

Sad this is even necessary. Progressive loading is a relic of a bygone 28.8 kbps era. Connections are fast enough is where you should be able to draw everything into an off-screen buffer and display the completed page in one go.

[kevingadd]

People on lower quality connections (high packet loss/roundtrip) eat a lot of delay on page loads because the average site connects to like 20+ servers and the browser has to spin up a bunch of http connections. Then you have to wait for javascript to load... this is unavoidable.

[rayiner]

> Then you have to wait for javascript to load... this is unavoidable.

JavaScript is not “unavoidable,” it’s a self-inflicted gunshot wound.