a wee little rant
Just in case you, gentle, true reader, ever have the opportunity to design a website that grabs focus automatically when its pages finish loading, please don’t. It is the most annoying thing ever. You’re waiting for gmail or amazon to load a page (the two biggest violators that come to mind), so you go do something in another tab or window. Happily typing away, or browsing. But then it finishes loading and amazon suddenly pops to the front, unbidden, unannouced. Suddenly your keystrokes are being sent to that webpage, your train of thought from reading in the other tab is derailed. That is incredibly stupid behavior. WTF are they thinking? Does this happen in Firefox and IE too? Maybe it’s just Safari? Am I the only one who thinks this is fantastically obnoxious?
Thanks; rant done.
March 6th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
Haha – indeed! Although I don’t seem to have that problem in Firefox (much) anymore unless a new window is opened. But then again I have plugins blocking most anything that pops up or isn’t html/javascript proper (flash, etc).
March 7th, 2006 at 12:23 am
That, my friend, is bad browser design/implementation/coding – not a fault in the web page. The web page says “hey, stick the focus over here”, it doesn’t say “when you finish loading, make sure you pop this window up to interrupt, frustrate and bug the crap out of the user.
Camino – a superior browser – does this better, and it’s something that even Firefox doesn’t do right. It maintains a focus for every tab, instead of a single focus within the window (across all tabs) which allows this sort of sneaky focus stealing to happen.
Regardless, file a bug with Apple – they’ll be shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that Safari has a bug.
March 7th, 2006 at 6:16 am
Dunno. Some web sites do that and some don’t. When one does, I personally lose aplomb. I want to flail the designer.
March 7th, 2006 at 9:40 am
Haha, thanks, Alex. Yeah, Safari has been crashing quite frequently on me since the latest update. It must be those buggy webpages I’m visiting!
But seriously, I don’t doubt that Safari has implemented something dumbly, but what is the correct behavior supposed to be? I mean, gmail isn’t even setting the focus onto a textfield or anything, so why is it asking for focus to begin with? When is asking for focus called for at all, unless you’re explicitly trying to get in the user’s face? I know they do all kinds of crazy shit over there at google, but, for example, feedlounge’s keyboard shortcuts work without exhibiting this focus-grabbing behavior.
By the way, feedlounge is a bajillion times more usable with those speed improvements you put in a couple weeks ago. It pretty much rocks now. =) Er … I and know this should go in the proper place, but I seem to have issues deleting tags. As in I can’t delete tags. I think I tried it in Firefox at some point, too.
March 12th, 2006 at 11:13 am
[...] figure/field – a wee little rant – most browsers implement focus poorly, Camino does it well. [...]