
The Billion Dollar Line of JavaScript: document.f.q.focus(); - nreece
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/billion-dollar-javascript/
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aston
'Cause Google was the first company to ever think of putting the cursor in the
only input[type=text] on the page onload.

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avinashv
This article is pretty old, and I've seen it pop up a few times on many of the
other social news sites, but that isn't my problem. Something that has always
bugged me is some of the ludicrous claims in the article. Take the following:

"It is quicker to type “Amazon” into Google and click on the first result than
it is to type www.amazon.com into your address bar."

No chance. In fact, I am pretty confident my (essentially) computer-illiterate
father could type "www." and ".com" faster than he could search, wait for the
page to load, move the mouse over to the first result, and click it. I see
where Altoft is trying to go with it, but his argument is poorly worded. He
means the "large number of users" that don't know much about computers--or so
I think he does.

I would have liked to see him talk about the integration Google
<em>already</em> has with Firefox (type "ebay" into the address bar). I
haven't looked into why it happens, but sometimes (like with "ebay") Google
defaults to "I'm feeling lucky" results, i.e. it will take you straight to the
page, but other times it gives you the search results. "scrable" takes me to a
specific webpage, but "scrabble" takes me to the search listings.

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Kelevra
Does anyone still type "www" ... ever?

I think Firefox just tries several common TLDs when it can't resolve a name,
i.e., when you type "ebay", it tries "ebay.com", "ebay.org", "ebay.net", etc.
No integration with Google required.

That's why "ebay" gets you to "ebay.com" and "slashdot" gets you to
"slashdot.org", but "del.icio" doesn't go to "del.icio.us", and "last" doesn't
go to "last.fm" even though those are the #1 Google results for "del.icio" and
"last".

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avinashv
You're right, that didn't occur to me. I don't type "www." and I would imagine
a lot of people don't. Then again, I can't say for certain people like my dad
understand that you can remove it.

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myoung8
This was on YC like 3 months ago...

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chengmi
More like 5 months ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65566>

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TheTarquin
That's really cool. It's amazing the profound effect that little UI tweaks can
have. Not only in the sense that it makes software a better tool, but also in
that something as simple as focusing on a textbox encourages users to use that
tool in a certain way.

In this case, a way that makes Google money by the bushel-full.

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wallflower
I remember reading about an (pre-AOL+TW) AOL exec boast about those
promotional boxes that show-up when people login/logoff AOL. He was saying
that if he had a box that said 'Click here to pay $10 for absolutely nothing -
that a percentage of their customers would click on it'

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ivankirigin
Related? 6% of users account for 50% of Ad clicks.

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gaika
I bet you found it on jaanix :) Congrats!

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nreece
Actually I did :) Nice site you got there mate.

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anon
I hope the "next HTML" has a way to do it declaratively, so I can disable
Javascript.

