Firefox new tab has a box in the middle of the page for you to click in and enter text to search in your default search engine - and it immediately starts typing in the URL bar. IF I WANTED TO USE THE URL BAR I WOULD CLICK THERE.
Throws me off every time.
No, not at all, I’m not sure where you got that idea from.
What I’m talking about is when developers (or anyone else designing a public interface) utilise something which produces unintuitive results - in this case it’s the idea that when a user clicks in a box in the middle of the screen, the next thing that happens is that typed text appears somewhere other than where they clicked.
That’s not a bug, that’s just bad design.
I was sympathising with the OP who encountered this particular example, but also making fun of a general trend for this sort of thing, where companies and designers sometimes seem to think that regardless of what the user did, they should be railroaded into doing what the designer wants them to do.
It’s the wrong approach IMO, and leads to frustrating interactions with software. Or at least mildly irritating ones.