[venzaspa]

Not nearly as nasty as scroll hijacking so the page moves at a different speed than what I've instructed it to move at. Or pastejacking - when you're trying to copy a piece of text and the page makes you grab an entirely different string to what you'd highlighted and selected.

[T_Potato]

Oh when you open an app to do a task and you get 5 new pop ups asking you to let them show you the new tool. Like, no. I don't have the bandwith right now. i'ld love to look at them but you chose the worse time. And then you can never go back to see what the tutorial was on the new feature.

[smallmancontrov]

Focus-stealing, too! Especially bad with Microsoft products. I can picture exactly what happened: a thousand complaints of "I lost a window in the heaping mess of open work on my desktop" each turned into a ticket to add Just One More focus steal until the first minute of a Microsoft-powered desktop's existence is various projects fighting in a brawl to repeatedly steal focus from one another.

It was a major win for the internet that it took this power away from the application layer.

[datenyan]

I have often thought about trying to figure out whatever Win32 API is responsible for focus stealing and neuter it down to something akin to

  void steal_focus_when_user_is_least_expecting() {
    // stub, much better :)
  }

It is the single most frustrating desktop computing experience.

[bluGill]

Problem it isn't an API, it is just unexpected consequences of how a few things work. Fixing this just isn't easy as the simple attempts will break even more than the frustrating thing you are trying to fix - and thus be worse.

That said, Microsoft should have fixed this long ago - it is hard but a few people can do it given a few years to work through all the special cases.

[dleslie]

Not just frustrating, it's a security hole. Stealing focus means a user may expect to be typing a password but find it's inputted somewhere they did not expect.

[newscombinatorY]

I'd add preventing text selection, right-clicking or pasting from the clipboard to the list. I hate when websites do that.

[stvltvs]

Especially egregious when preventing pasting into a password field. Do they want me to have a weak password so that I can manually type it in instead of pasting it from a password manager?

[michaelcampbell]

There's an old, but good, set of browser plugins called "don't fuck with paste" that helps a little, at least.

[antiframe]

Setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in about:config to false will prevent sites from messing with cut and paste.

[LoganDark]

In Firefox

[LorenDB]

Brave actually added a force paste option recently for such cases.

[shultays]

Spacebar hijacking, it is how I scroll webpages

[LorenDB]

Or right-click hijacking. e.g. Discord's web app, where I might want to right click a link in a message to copy it. But instead, Discord forces their own right-click menu with no such option.

[cmiles74]

Slack does this with links (they all point to Slack instead of the URL in the message) and it drives me nuts.

[pezgrande]

Same in Discord, crappy apps.