Text snapping?

I can't explain this in brief

[neonrider]

Some time ago I went to login to my ebay account. Once I entered first three letters into ebay login id field the text got "moved" (snapped? stolen?). It (3 letters) just disappeared, but in a way as if someone lifted it off or copied it and took off. I don't know how else to explain. It happened before many times on a Gooogle search engine text field. First word of the search phrase used to disapear the same way. Any ideas?

Even now, when I tried to post the pasted text here, on the first attempted nothing posted even if I mouse-clicked the text field prior to posting the text. Only on the second attempt it worked. On the first attempt to post text it looked as if something lifted-off the "skin" off the text field. WTH?

[rocknbil]

If I read you right, this is the effect of some programmer's idea of where they think you should be focused. I HATE this! :-) A page loads, you begin typing into a field before the Javascript loads, then when it does it moves the focus to another object - sometimes one that's not even an input field - and you lose the rest of your text.

I've seen this on both eBay and payPal, as well as others. An example is a "certain" domain registrar's page that has both the login box and the "search for a domain" box on the same page. They want to sell domains, so they put the focus on the search for domains box onLoad. So I begin login by typing "rockinbil" and the login field gets 'roc'

and the search for domains field gets 'knbil'.

:-P

[justgowithit]

I've got my homepage set to Yahoo! at work but I use Google's toolbar for searches. I'll get about half the query into the toolbar and then the focus kicks in on Yahoo!'s search box where I (most of the time) unknowingly type the other half of the query.

I wonder how much of an impact this has on a search engine's numbers? If Yahoo! (or others) boast that they have X amount of searches a month, that number is probably 10% javascript focus junk.