Another Reason Not to Use Amazon
Posted December 29th, 2004 @ 12:56pm by Erik J. Barzeski
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.
Donate Life
Posted 29 Dec 2004 at 1:25pm #
Doesn't happen to me in Firefox. Is this Safari?
Posted 29 Dec 2004 at 1:29pm #
Yep.
Posted 29 Dec 2004 at 3:11pm #
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.
Posted 29 Dec 2004 at 3:20pm #
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.
Posted 29 Dec 2004 at 3:40pm #
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.
Posted 29 Dec 2004 at 4:31pm #
i noticed Gmail does the same thing when it finishes loading the inbox. i'm using Opera.
Posted 29 Dec 2004 at 8:50pm #
Maybe if I encode the tags this time...
<script language="Javascript1.1" type="text/javascript">
<!--
top.focus();
//-->
</script>
Posted 30 Dec 2004 at 3:45am #
i dont know if this link expires...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/handle-generic-form/002-1164508-5758417?action=next-page&target=stores/help/self-service-email-form-dispatch.html&display=basic&browse=560710&method=GET
let 'em know it's annoying.
Posted 30 Dec 2004 at 6:24pm #
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
Posted 01 Jan 2005 at 8:06pm #
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.
Posted 18 Jan 2005 at 5:16pm #
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.