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by marginalia_nu 1521 days ago
I know a site, it's on mobile. You use it by entering a location in a search bar.

You select the search bar, the keyboard takes a second to appear. You start typing, nothing happens because they've reimplemented the text box in javascript, and the script hasn't fully loaded yet. The script loads and the second half of the letters you typed appears in a letter by letter fashion. The page freezes and a suggestion box appears, every second or so the suggestions change to reflect the letters you typed earlier. You erase what you've typed. With every letter that changes, the page freezes a second as a new suggestion loads. When it freezes, it stops accepting letters, so there's a lot of erasing and re-typing. Alright, you're almost done typing... then the page freezes and the page turns grey, and a pop over loads. They want you to load fill out a satisfaction survey. You try to close it to continue, but the script handling the close button hasn't loaded yet so it doesn't work for a good 20 seconds.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a javascript stomping on a human face -- for ever.

1 comments

This accurately describes my experience using Google Search on Google Chrome on a Google Pixel 5 running the latest version of Google Android (for good measure, using Gboard). It baffles me that for a long time I couldn't even select text in the search bar without something going so wrong that my phone ground to a halt and had to soft reboot.