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Another Reason Not to Use Amazon

Every time the page finishes loading, the damn window comes to the front. This includes being in another tab, in another window, and having minimized the window with amazon.com in it.

I type a search, flip to a new tab, and a few seconds later, BLAM, there's amazon.com again.

If you could flip a website the bird and yell "fuck off," amazon.com would get my bird and curse today. 😛 This is more annoying than target="_blank" links.

11 Responses to "Another Reason Not to Use Amazon"

  1. Doesn't happen to me in Firefox. Is this Safari?

  2. Yep.

  3. Did they redesign it today, I thought it was sudddenly much less useful. I did an order from textbookx.com yesterday. I thought there prices were good but they don't have all the info like Amazon. I filled a shopping cart at textbookx and Amazon and the prior was much cheaper so I got it there.

  4. Pages that grab focus are SO extremely annoying. There was one site that I used to frequent that set the focus to the login form when the page loaded. That meant that I could be typing something in a form in one tab, and all of a sudden the site steals focus and I'm typing in the password field for that site.

  5. Wow, that freakin sucks. I doubt it's an accident they waited till after Christmas to launch such a aggressive "feature" either.

    Boo... Hisss.... Shame on you Amazon.

  6. i noticed Gmail does the same thing when it finishes loading the inbox. i'm using Opera.

  7. Maybe if I encode the tags this time...

    <script language="Javascript1.1" type="text/javascript">

    <!--

    top.focus();

    //-->

    </script>

  8. Ha, I just got a response from Amazon. Here it is:

    Thanks for writing to us at Amazon.com.

    We're sorry to hear you have experienced a problem with our site--

    this sounds like one that may be related to the browser you are

    using. I have checked with out technical staff and found that this

    problem occurs due to the internet settings in your browser.

    Therefore, you can explore settings with the browser. Please note

    that browsers automatically load any page upfront of everything

    else. At this point of time, I would request you to contact your

    system administrator for further information.

    Rest assured this is not a default that we select for every customer

    who views our website.

    I hope this information is useful in avoiding the error message you

    encountered. Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com

  9. Hmmm. Not a default for every customer? I guess I'm a special customer too because I'm getting the same script code that Philip identified.

    Some quick tests:

    IE 6.0 (win), IE 5.2 (mac), Netscape 7.2 (win), FireFox 1.0 (mac), and Safari 1.2.4 all exhibit the problem with windows.

    Interestingly the browsers that support tabs handle the top.focus() call differently. Netscape and FireFox will bring the window to the top but won't change the selected tab. So if you use one of these browsers and browse in multiple tabs but all in one window, Amazon won't pop to the front.

  10. I feel the same way you people do it's annoying when you are trying to multitask. I'm sending it to apple as a bug report for Safari.