I so very much despise Google Instant.

[kane_magus]

Whenever I happen to be using a computer on which I'm not actively logged in to Google with my own account (in which case I most assuredly have it disabled) and it starts auto-finding results while I'm typing them in... ugh. To me, for whatever reason, it's the Internet search engine equivalent of fingernails on chalkboard. I can't explain why. It just is.

Comments

[david-grana.livejournal.com]

I have Google as my homepage.

Whenever I boot up Firefox, it brings up the homepage... and even though I start typing in the address bar first, the cursor swings down to the search bar on the page, then shoots right on over to whatever it could auto-complete from the characters I inadvertently entered there. Really, REALLY hate that crap.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I've had similar problems on a few different sites, most perniciously on the Comcast email login page. I would load the page and start typing in my username and password, and in the middle of typing my password, the cursor would suddenly jump back up to the username field. It has something to do with the page not being fully loaded and then when it finishes loading, it (incorrectly) assumes that because I loaded that page that I obviously want to start typing something in the particular field it decides I should start with, even though I've already moved on past that. Now, I just wait until any pages are completely loaded before I start typing anything in them, especially username/password stuff (though in the case of the Comcast email login page, it already looked like it was fully loaded, aside from the tiny swirly icon in the Firefox tab at the top). It's an inconvenience of several seconds or more, in some cases.

With the Comcast thing, I was always able to catch myself before I hit enter after putting the password in the wrong field when that happened... but I wonder how many other people on that or any other site have had partial or even whole passwords accidentally entered into the username field and submitted (and thus most likely fully visible to the other end, rather than hashed or whatever like a password normally should be) because of this kind of crap. Seems like it could even potentially be a fairly devious password phishing scheme on less reputable sites.