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Auto-hiding elements are one of the worst trends in "modern" UIs. I've had countless times where I had to waste a lot of effort trying to find controls that were hidden and only appeared if you hovered for long enough in the right place. It reminds me of this amusing comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293

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Late-appearing elements are really annoying as well. They like appear under your mouse the moment you want to click on something.

Can second this. UI elements should not suddenly shift in place, unless interacted with or clearly communicated in advance (think a traffic light going yellow then red).

In the old days, the solution was simple - block the UI.

But nowadays - a background thread will search for the stuff that should appear in the UI, and adds that directly when it found something.

You can solve the problem by changing the mouse icon to the hourglass, blocking the UI for just enough time to not get any accidental clicks, and update it.

As side effect, every update now takes some time - so you have to minimize the number of updates.

I'm hoping that with websites having cumulative layout shift (https://web.dev/cls/) metrics considered in Google search ranking this will become less common?

(Discloseure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

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