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Comment by adkadskhj | Hacker News Reader

> And so it should be. There's hardly anything worse than having things shift around after you start reading, scrolling or clicking on something.

Oh my god, this is one of my largest complaints. I'm an impatient person so i often go to click something before the page is done - bad me - and so often JS loads and swaps buttons.

Honestly though i've had that complaint about my OS', too. The number of times i'm typing and something pops up and steals focus or i go to click something and moments before it shifts causing me to click something else.. ugh.

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If I was a native widget toolkit designer or web developer I'd implement a rule that all layout changes must be rendered and on the screen 150ms before input handling can use them. Lag compensation for local user input. If you click a button at the same time it moves, you should still click what was on the screen at the time you pressed the button.

Yes, I know this effectively means having to keep two copies of the widget tree (one for input and one for output) and applying all changes as diffs. Don't care. I'll buy more RAM.

When I switched to Mac, that was one of the most refreshing things about OSX: apps weren't allowed to steal focus.

Sadly, that's no longer true.

Is that a very recent change? I don't know that I've ever noticed that on macOS, but I started using this OS around Lion, I think

I know something worse: websites that force you to use their app, providing links that don’t actually take you to that content in the app. Two examples with the same experience: Instagram and Reddit. They block functionality on the mobile web pages in Safari, pop up large buttons to get you to use the app, then those buttons take you to the iOS App Store page even though I already have each installed, then clicking “open” there just opens each app to the default home page, NOT the content I was trying to access but was subsequently blocked from accessing.

Result: I decide that I don’t care about that content anyway and just go do something else. Trying to log in via mobile site, forgetting my password, going through the reset flow, logging in again because my pw reset session happened in GMail’s safari context session and didn’t save cookies to main safari, all while being hounded constantly that “it’s better in the APP!”…just keep it.

Pinterest is uniquely bad because the thing you see the photo of doesn’t actually take you to the place where that came from. Add in all the ads, the page wasting tons of space with spacing / white space / low density, the placement on Google for so many thing, and I cringe whenever I see a Pinterest result. Quora isn’t much better.

Amazon and eBay at least take you to the right place with their “open in app” bars at the top of the page. Not an iOS dev but I’m assuming they’re using some special Safari APIs to do that instead of useless generic App Store links that don’t pass through context.

I really wish Google / Apple would punish sites for doing this, since it leads to such a bad UX. Please think about that, marketing and product people: I literally already have your apps, but you’ve made the mobile web page so annoying in trying to get me to use the app, that any interesting content I do find via SERP I discard instantly as inaccessible due to the hassle of trying to search for that same content through your apps, because you’ve intentionally broken the mobile web experience.

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