Because it's distracting - when you're typing, you expect the letters to appear one at a time in an orderly fashion. If the UI is flickering drop-down lists at you that get shorter as you type, or whatever, then there's a chance that you'll pay the faintest bit of attention to them. At which point you're wasting effort that could have been spent typing. If you manage not to pay the faintest bit of attention to them than you can just about break even.
That said, I find auto-completion quite useful when typing urls. It's just useless for forms, because the only things I type repeatedly into forms are usernames, which are short enough that I can type them in one go - I don't need auto-completion.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-01-21 04:59 pm (UTC)That said, I find auto-completion quite useful when typing urls. It's just useless for forms, because the only things I type repeatedly into forms are usernames, which are short enough that I can type them in one go - I don't need auto-completion.