Bug and Impact

The homepage Core Areas carousel could overwrite an explicit click or keyboard selection after scrollIntoView() settled. At common viewport widths, selecting AI Penetration Testing showed Thick Clients, and selecting Thick Clients showed Web3 / Blockchain Security, causing a significant user-facing correctness break in the primary homepage interaction.

Root Cause

The debounced passive scroll-sync handler treated the browser scroll generated by our own scrollIntoView() call as user scrolling, recomputed the active tab from the carousel center, and replaced the explicit selection with a neighboring tab when the selected tab could not be centered at scroll extents.

Fix

Suppress scroll-sync while programmatic carousel scrolling is in progress and initialize the carousel state without forcing a synthetic scroll.

Validation

• Reproduced the pre-fix failure in headless Chrome at 480px, 640px, and 1024px.
• Verified post-fix click selection across 280, 320, 375, 480, 640, 768, and 1024px.
• Verified keyboard ArrowRight selection at 480px and 1024px.
• Ran static integrity checks for 5 HTML files, 1 CSS file, 28 local refs, 1 CSS URL asset, 2 inline scripts, duplicate IDs, _blank rel safety, and #focusPanel visibility.