online blitz != over the board blitz
Those who say premove is illegal(?!?) computer assistance, also complain about not having to hit the clock after their move? Automatic clock handling is the same thing as premove: a standard feature of online chess.
It's a good thing because it helps players use their time in the most efficient way possible. I personally would not play on a site where premove was unavailable or where there's a considerable (>0.1s) time penalty associated with it.
Premove has been part of online chess for years. It wouldn't be as fun without it.
I generally dislike premove, and I would prefer online chess without it, honestly.
I'm just not at all a fan of mad time scrambles where factors having nothing to do with the position become the focal point of play (like making short moves close to the clock in OTB time scrambles, or making "surprising" premoves online).
Premove just encourages that sort of thing. It's not all bad, of course, since it does allow some things like KQk to be won with little time on the clock.
My suspicion, though, is that for every one of those objective wins it allows to be played, there are several of the mad, completely random time scrambles I dislike so much.
Of course, premove has been around so long that people are used to it, so as indicated by some of the other responses, it would be next to impossible for a site to be popular without offering it.
At this point, I think those of us who dislike it just have to grin and live with it if we play fast sudden death time controls :)
Of course, the simple solution is for us to always play with a small increment; that solves everything nicely, but those time controls aren't as popular, likely for the same reason that premoving IS popular.
C'est la vie :)
Euuuh guys ! Premoves on liches also cost 0.1second !
As for the reason premove is used everywhere - I think it's simple pragmatism. To my knowledge it first emerged back in the day when most of all chess sites were telnet based and people could and did write their own graphical client apps. Some people started adding premove into these apps and it gave people who were using them an enormous advantage over others.
So the sites faced the decision of ban it or embrace it. And I think banning it is practically impossible. If necessary 'smart' premove systems could simply add a variable delay of a 0.1-0.4s to a move to simulate human input and there is no real way to tell if that's a very fast human or a computer. So whether it's desirable or not is really immaterial. You can't get rid of it. On web based sites, like Lichess, people would just write browser extensions to premove. So it's here to stay.
As for its implementation, I tend to fall on the side of preferring a 0.1s premove minimum since I think it creates a better balance between 'mouse skills' and time management.
I don't understand why people love premove so much, it makes the game a mess in time trouble.
Without premove there is always a rythm in the game.
In bullet your mind is always 1 step ahead, you make a move and expect a certain reply and make your next move in your mind based on that reply, if your opponent makes the move you anticipated you instantly move and repeat the process. This is the fast rythm.
If your opponent moves something else, you need to take a glance and then move, this could be called the slow rythm I suppose (since i'm making a comparison to music).
So a game of bullet is all about rythm, playing chess to a rythm. It's beautiful, exciting, fast and it has a rythm, like a beating heart. If there is no premove, this rythm continues to the last second of the game, because a player who drops out of the rythm, will lose. You still do all the flagging tricks but you do them in rythm.
With premove, the last seconds of the game don't have to have rythm, because premove enables flagging the opponent without rythm, just by premoving aimelessly. This is ugly chess, ugly bullet. Chess without purpose.