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> 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. W

> 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.

mstade 8y ago
> 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!
brink 8y ago
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.
- itchyjunk 8y ago
  Do you mean like this? [0] [0] https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY
  - brownbat 8y ago
    That whole series provided some great anti-patterns: https://imgur.com/gallery/YU6EA https://imgur.com/gallery/YU6EA
- mushufasa 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
  - dorgo 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        Ublock origin has the :has and :xpath operators for cases like this. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-filters https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...
  - mort96 8y ago
    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.
- airstrike 8y ago
  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...
  - EGreg 8y ago
    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"
  - Scramblejams 8y ago
    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.
    - airstrike 8y ago
      Try slowly typing in "Performance" in the Windows 10 start menu and watch the top result flip around pretty much at each key press...
    - filoleg 8y ago
      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.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    >and half the time I'd end up clicking on the advertisement when it loaded. Just as planned
    - dTal 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        It might be the result of developing it on a fast internet connection in the office where the ad loads up straight away.
    - benj111 8y ago
      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.
- usrusr 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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"!
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- erichurkman 8y ago
  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/2019/03/19/warren-buffett-prize-march-madness/3212487002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/tourney/2019/03/...
  - CamperBob2 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      >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.
- SomeHacker44 8y ago
  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.
- shivo 8y ago
  CNET, ZDNet etc
copperx 8y ago
> 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.
organsnyder 8y ago
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.
rayiner 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    > Then you have to wait for javascript to load... this is unavoidable. JavaScript is not “unavoidable,” it’s a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
miohtama 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
dpcan 8y ago
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.
pmoriarty 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
  I'm on Windows 7 and losing focus is a continuous annoyance. I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard.
Razengan 8y ago
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.

mstade 8y ago

> 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!

brink 8y ago

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.

itchyjunk 8y ago
Do you mean like this? [0] [0] https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY
- brownbat 8y ago
  That whole series provided some great anti-patterns: https://imgur.com/gallery/YU6EA https://imgur.com/gallery/YU6EA
mushufasa 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- dorgo 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      Ublock origin has the :has and :xpath operators for cases like this. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-filters https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...
- mort96 8y ago
  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.
airstrike 8y ago
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...
- EGreg 8y ago
  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"
- Scramblejams 8y ago
  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.
  - airstrike 8y ago
    Try slowly typing in "Performance" in the Windows 10 start menu and watch the top result flip around pretty much at each key press...
  - filoleg 8y ago
    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.
linsomniac 8y ago
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 8y ago
  >and half the time I'd end up clicking on the advertisement when it loaded. Just as planned
  - dTal 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      It might be the result of developing it on a fast internet connection in the office where the ad loads up straight away.
  - benj111 8y ago
    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.
usrusr 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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"!
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
erichurkman 8y ago
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/2019/03/19/warren-buffett-prize-march-madness/3212487002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/tourney/2019/03/...
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    >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.
SomeHacker44 8y ago
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.
shivo 8y ago
CNET, ZDNet etc

copperx 8y ago

> 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.

organsnyder 8y ago

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.

rayiner 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > Then you have to wait for javascript to load... this is unavoidable. JavaScript is not “unavoidable,” it’s a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

miohtama 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

dpcan 8y ago

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.

pmoriarty 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
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 8y ago
I'm on Windows 7 and losing focus is a continuous annoyance. I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard.

Razengan 8y ago

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.