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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

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."

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

Just as planned

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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