I didn’t think I’d be changing my startup page again for a long time.

Looks like I was wrong. Check out Google Suggest.

Lemme explain why this is so cool. First of all, it saves you keystrokes entering your search terms. That’s the externally cool thing.

The internal cool thing is that it’s one of the first prominent uses I’ve seen of the IFRAME XmlHttpRequest technique of going back to the web server for more data while the user interacts with a page. This has been possible for a long long time, but web developers have been mostly ignoring it. Rob Whelan explains how it’s done.

The latency of web UIs, in which everything you do is a slow round-trip that requires completely refetching and rebuilding the web page, is one of the reason web UIs feel so clunky compared to native GUIs. Google is very publicly raising the bar on the quality of interfaces that people will expect from web pages.