Search is interrupted (and sometimes triggers page shortcuts)

[Neil Stoker]

Recently on an internal Confluence site, several colleagues and I have noticed that searches in the main search bar get interrupted when the user has already started typing.

The problem is intermittent and we believe we understand the key aspects behind it, but I am unsure what can be done to stop it occurring.

Although the page is shown as loaded, at a point soon after the user starts typing in a search, something stops the remaining keyboard input being treated as a search.  This is annoying in itself but if you happen to continue typing without realising, often shortcut keys will be triggered (eg if the rest of your search contained a "c" then it will launch the "Create Page" shortcut or an "s" will launch "Share This Page").

To illustrate, if you were searching for "Rebeccah", you might find that the search box had accepted "Rebe" but then the "c" had triggered the "Create Page" shortcut to appear and the rest of the text did not go into the search box as it no longer had focus. There is no interaction with the mouse causing it and nor is tab being pressed to change focus.

It seems like there may be some long-running page requests which continue after the page shows as being loaded (ie all page content is visible and the spinner in Chrome stops but if you look in the Chrome console, you will see some items continue for a while longer).

Our working theory is that at the end of one of these requests loading, reaching that point is triggering the status of search to get reset (even though the user has already started searching) so that it is not in focus and that results in this bug - I don't mean to offend for those who think it isn't a bug, but there's basically no way that a user should be able to start searching and then have searching involuntarily stop without warning. It wouldn't happen on any public facing search engine and I see no justification for it here.  In the unlikely event that the asset/request truly is essential for the search to complete then it should wait until it is loaded before users can start (although it seems unlikely these things are essential as sometimes initial results are seen only for it to reset)

Has anyone else seen this kind of problem?  In particular on lower performance networks (eg in offices distant from the server)