And while they are at it, put the dang refresh button back in the url bar. I have never used the speech input button to enter a url into the field. One tap becomes two taps to do something as common as refreshing the page.

I know it is very difficult for professional users to understand this, but from a design perspective this is actually very well done. These animations are really helpful for people who aren't spending their whole day in front of a computer and rely on cues to help their orientation.

I've done usability tests where these "issues" came up, whenever a dropdown or any other form of interaction suddenly popped up and the user had to spend valuable time to re-focus to find out what exactly happened and if this was indeed the right control. Additionally animations are also very useful for transition purposes. Guiding the user from one screen to another can be quite stressful when it's done in an instant and the user has to understand what's happened. This is why Apple's guidelines to transition the screens in a horizontal motion were so damn good, because they allowed users to spatially recognize their "position" in the UI. And I'm glad that the MD guidelines now also state that transitions have to be spatially correct and a screen transition isn't just a window jumping out from the center of the screen. [0]

Of course these animations are only temporary and can only help you so much, but they're very good for consumers when they are noticed. And that's all they really are: helpers, not the sole messenger of the meaning of the UI.

But of course I understand the plight of delayed interactions. UI lag that is caused by hardware aside, they're really annoying. But I see that more of a problem of customization. The OS should allow to switch off any animation.

[0] http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful-trans...

"Best practices - Support spatial relationships through consistent motions for incoming and outgoing elements."

Couldn't agree more. And I've started to think that one of the reasons open JS grid and tree controls are so lackluster is that there is too much effort being spent on animations in general. The 'flip and fade in' display options are never useful, but being able to work effectively with high-dimensional, hierarchial data would be. Sencha is closest, but I still have to do a lot of low-level customization to work with dynamically defined columns.

I'd love if my iOS 8 worked buttery smooth. No animations. Just click -> open. I hate even a small delay. Every delay is time wasted. I wonder how much time I've cumulatively wasted on UI animations in my life.

Office 2007(?) had that fade-in menu gimmick.

Amusing and sad to watch mobile evolution recapitulate desktop design, not skipping over the dumb ideas.