I remember the time (10 years ago?) where you could go to google webpage and start typing your search immediately. Then one day I got my typing deleted once the page finished loading. I thought Google would quickly fix this, but soon realized that this kind of annoying asynchronous behavior was becoming a new normal for a lot of GUIs. I have a rule in my GUIs to only show up something when it’s consistent and usable: the GUI should never lie or mislead.
This has started happening to me constantly in Amazon! I start searching for something, make a typo, go back, then somehow it snaps back to the typo before I hit enter and I get bad results. Super annoying, I don’t remember it being a thing before a year or so ago.
The ebay search button has been like this for ages. To the extent, that sometimes, you correct your search query, hit enter to search and it resets back to the previous search query and re-searches that!
You can thank things like auto-suggest for this as well.
I remember the first time I encountered the epiphany that "woah, typing too fast can break my textbox/inputs" and coming to the realization that in order to accommodate the faster users you often have to be very careful thinking out your UI flow.
Hence why I hate UI's. Sometimes feels like they are nothing more than a fight between me and another developer.
Google search bar also breaks the standard OS behaviour on a Mac, eg. when I am i the search bar and hit <cmd-left> it should jump cursor to the beginning of the line, which it doesn't.
is this possibly a case of "leaky abstraction"? e.g a "data oriented" ui where data flows in 1 direction, so updates to said data blows away any intermediate state?
