13 ms·

Chrome / Chromium have a habit of making these arbitrary changes that seriously annoy some (arguably small) percentage of their users, while claiming that it ma

• marcoperaza 10y ago
  Maintaining software quality is hard. Each additional toggle doubles the size of your test matrix.
  • Jedd 10y ago
    I totally appreciate this. I really do. My defence here is that the test matrix for the way it worked already existed. And the change would have included some unit tests. Further, neither the way it worked, or was changed to work, is an especially complex mechanism. Developer explanations in the bug reports for both were not 'this is going to be hard to maintain', but instead were 'having this configurable will confuse users'.
• lstamour 10y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if the defaults on OS X are the same. #2 in particular, I consider that to be sensible autofocus behavior. If you don't want to replace the URL but instead modify it, just hit an arrow key. Partly this is because there are shortcuts to select the address bar to begin with, so I rarely use a mouse. It's generally consistent on mobile platforms too, to select the entire URL. You have to hold your finger a second time to position the cursor because the most common interaction with the URL bar usually means jumping somewhere entirely different. Edit: they could maintain a flag to change these behaviours though, if they were a concern. You could also build your own copy of the browser, patched as you wish... ;-)
  • iSnow 10y ago
    >It wouldn't surprise me if the defaults on OS X are the same. #2 in particular It used to be different, but that behavior unfortunately has made it to default in OS X now. It annoys me to no small extend, since I very frequently want to edit URL's to remove session ID's or reference tokens. Of course, the average user is to daft to double-click...
    • fzzzy 10y ago
      Just click and drag to select.
• cptskippy 10y ago
  I'm primarily on Windows and that first feature annoys the heck out of me. I would rather scrolling stop or continue, but the snap-back when the mouse leaves a zone is irritating. I think the second is more of an optimization because when you click on the address bar you're most likely either copying or overwriting the URL. It's much less common to modify it. If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should check out Windows File Explorer from Vista/7 onward. Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.
  • Nr7 10y ago
    The file explorer address bar was one of the best features that were introduced in Vista IMO. If you're in folder "C:\foo\bar\baz\boz\" and want to go to "C:\foo\" it's just one mouse click. Or if you want to go to "C:\foo\bor" that's just two mouse clicks. Much faster than clicking "back" or "up" multiple times.
    • eganist 10y ago
      To add to this, I believe in Windows 10 (possibly 8?) you can actually move files to a grandparent folder by dragging it to the associated button in the breadcrumb bar. Going from memory since I couldn't reproduce this behavior in 7. Could also be wrong about 10; someone else should try it and confirm.
      • Guest98123 10y ago
        I just tested in Windows 10, and you're right, you can drag files to any of the parent directories in the address bar.
        • eganist 10y ago
          Sweet. Yeah, I remember doing it once and thinking it was extremely helpful at the time, but I only remember doing it once so far.
      • 10y ago
• mrweasel 10y ago
  2. is a lot like Outlook (at least on Mac), oh you highlighted something, I'll just go a head and assume that that's the only part of the original email you'll want quotes in the reply... WHY? If I wanted the entire URL highlighted I could just double click on it like in every single other piece of software.
  • douche 10y ago
    It's infuriating trying to highlight anything in Outlook. Oh, you're dragging to select part of a word, or a huge long URI? Let me go ahead and automatically expand your selection to cover the entire token, with the trailing whitespace. Haha, you're trying to circumvent my helpfulness by setting the cursor and shift-right-arrowing? Haha, no soup for you! Break down and copy it into notepad instead!
    • mrweasel 10y ago
      > with the trailing whitespace. Worst feature EVER. I can't begin count how many times I've had the following talk with users: user: My password doesn't work me: Did you copy it from Outlook?
      • Daneel_ 10y ago
        Disable 'smart paragraph selection' and 'automatically select entire word' in the edit options. I turn these off instantly in Word every time I have to reinstall them. Problem solved.
        • sqeaky 10y ago
          He is helping people on the phone, he might never speak to the same person twice. Settings really aren't a solution for bad UX.
      • stevetrewick 10y ago
        If you're emailing users' passwords you've got bigger problems than a bit of trailing white space.
• nkozyra 10y ago
  > No idea what the defaults are for OSX, and, really, it doesn't matter - these features should be sensitive to extant defaults on whatever desktop environment the browser finds itself running on. I think there's an argument to be made in either direction. I use Chrome (and other apps like Sublime) on three different platforms and would much prefer to have commonality on the application level. Since it's a big part of my workflow, having it work differently from OS to OS would definitely slow me down.
  • freehunter 10y ago
    It really should be an option. Like how Sublime lets you pick between DOS and Unix style line breaks. Because that's how you handle cross platform discrepancies.
  • Jedd 10y ago
    I've been pondering your point for a while. The problem, I think, comes down to this -- more people use lots of different applications on one platform, than the same application on multiple platforms. If you're going to use one application only, on multiple platforms, then I could see how a consistency in the way that application behaved would be useful. But I can't see how anyone's workflow wouldn't involve interacting with some number of other applications on each of those platforms. At that point you could assert all applications on all platforms behave consistently. This is not likely to be a well-received suggestion. Or you could try to make all applications on a particular platform behave consistently. The latter seems to align with people's UI expectations, and, for the most part, is what we have out there now. The pain point is where expected behaviour from one platform bleeds into applications running on different platform where that behaviour might best be described as 'surprising'.
• cobalt 10y ago
  I've never heard of #1 and nor do I see it in any other app (Win 10) and for #2 I think that is how it is done on osx as well. I believe that a majority of google works off of macs so its likely that most of the chrome devs are on macs.
• jtreminio 10y ago
  > clicking inside the URL bar selects the whole contents This is one of the annoyances on Windows. On Linux/OSX you can click and drag on the URL to select a portion of the string, but on Windows it auto-highlights the full string completely, forcing one to reclick again (slowly!) to highlight a portion. Also: right-clicking on a link in Linux/OSX auto-highlights the full link text so you can `Copy` or `Search on Google` the highlighted text. In Windows you must manually highlight the link, then right-click on it. Small things add up to big annoyances.
  • ygra 10y ago
    > On Linux/OSX you can click and drag on the URL to select a portion of the string Works fine on Windows. Just don't click into the address bar before dragging and everything works as you'd expect. With clicking first you have a selection, though, and dragging that will do drag & drop of text instead.
  • diabeetusman 10y ago
    I'm running Chrome in Win10 and it does the exact behavior you describe only Linux/OSX doing.
• bcg1 10y ago
  obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
• 27182818284 10y ago
  The backspace thing has gotten attention more than ever on sites like Reddit. I have routinely seen posts complaining about it and the spacebar key doing behaviors that users never ever intended. For example, pressing space and then accidentally scrolling down which wasn't their intention at all, but is the behavior of space. I think some of those complaints reaching the front page of reddit may have helped spur this into action by the Chrome team.
  • retox 10y ago
    The tyranny of the vocal minority. It's a race to the bottom.
    • euyyn 10y ago
      So an opinion with enough upvotes to get to the front page of a site where power users lurk is "the tyranny of the vocal minority"?
      • Jare 10y ago
        Yep, their power-user-ness or the fact that they frequent a particular enthusiast forum does not make them any less of a minority when the software we're talking about is used by many millions of people (the silent majority).
    • r00fus 10y ago
      Do you think it actually makes sense to keep the backspace as "page-back"? It's literally lost me dozens of form entries over the years (some of which were very hard to restore). Thankfully on OSX/Safari, this legacy behavior/cruft is not present.
      • retox 10y ago
        Seems like change for change sake, like so many of Google changes. Unilaterally changing 20 year behaviour that effects less than half one percent of users isn't an improvement it's rearranging chairs on the titanic. Also, Lazarus is an old plugin for Firefox that saves forms between sessions/refreshes. Too bad goog want to capture new users at any expense. If it doesn't work because the latest hotness is js forms that's a problem with webdevs.
• fixermark 10y ago
  It's not free to add a configuration of this class to the advanced configurations; items in that list must be tested, maintained in future versions, etc. The kind of people who are willing to go to the Advanced Configuration Settings page are also willing to tweak their keyboard mappings to map any modifier key they want to to the "go back in history" accelerator for Chrome.
• caffinatedmonk 10y ago
  Speaking of annoying things Google has done lately, they recently updated Android's Google Keyboard completely changing the layout, keysize and removing most of the secondary (press and hold for more characters) keys. It has become almost impossible to type with it but I haven't found another keyboard with a good theme, haptic feedback and good suggestions. I miss the days Google used to cater to power users.
  • tw04 10y ago
    The long press is still there, it's just disabled by default. You can change it in the settings. You can also change the layout in settings, although I don't know specifically what changed there that you dislike.
  • stephengillie 10y ago
    Advanced search settings have been missing from the Google App for some time. To search only the past year, you have to use their mobile website.
  • chongli 10y ago
    If you press and hold on the comma key and go into languages, enabling languages such as French or Spanish will bring back the ability to press and hold for diacritical marks. As for your complaint about key size, I wouldn't know because I use swipe typing exclusively and have found the update a significant improvement. I also really appreciate the new gestures for deleting multiple words by swiping left on backspace and for moving the cursor by swiping on the space-bar.
    • azdle 10y ago
      You don't even need to do that much, if you just enable the "Long press for symbols" option in the preferences you get back the all of the previous behavior of long-pressing letters.
    • kuschku 10y ago
      > the ability to press and hold for diacritical marks Wait, they removed that (I didn’t do the update yet, refused to connect to WiFi to avoid it). I quite literally use that every minute – typing on UK layout German and British, and trained the dictionary to accept any mix of the two languages.
• undersuit 10y ago
  Yeah #2 selects the whole content visually, but it doesn't put the contents into the primary buffer, very annoying.
  • dflock 10y ago
    This was done deliberately after lots of user uproar - it used to auto select the contents of the URL bar AND set the primary selection. This meant that anytime you did anything with the URL bar, it would wipe your primary selection, which was pretty annoying. What Linux users wanted was for it to behave normally - i.e. not auto select, but set primary selection if you selected something in the URL. The auto select was apparently non-negotiable, so we ended up with the current compromise. It does set the primary selection if you manually select some/all of the URL though.
• ajnin 10y ago
  Reminds me of the "flaw of averages" article [1] that was posted here a few month back. This seems like a general attitude in Google products features development, they try to find the simplest set of features that will please the most users, but that set probably doesn't exist, each user needs their own tweaks, and in the end their product becomes less useful for everyone. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    I've come to suspect that the flaw of averages dynamic is indeed deeply instantiated at Google.
  • cyxxon 10y ago
    That page is not readable in Germany: ERROR. The request could not be satisfied. The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. Any idea what could block it? Never seen this before...
    • madeofpalk 10y ago
      > The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. Many CDNs can be configured to block access within a country. For whatever reason, that's what The Star has chosen here.
    • ajnin 10y ago
      The page seems to have been blocked from my country too (France) since I posted that link. Google's cache works : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KsgLFDLdtwAJ:https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KsgLFDL...
  • unexistance 10y ago
    great read, thanks :D now if only our cars are as adjustable, given the almost-similar circumstances
• mryingster 10y ago
  At one point I forked Chromium over the click-selects-all in the URL bar. In OS X, this was the only application that behaved that way (until Apple recently followed suit with Safari...). Now I just use FireFox because they give me the option to override the default. I edit URLs far more often than typing in new ones. If I am going to a new URL, I generally type command-l or open a new tab...
  • voiceofreason43 10y ago
    The point of highlighting the URL with a single click isn't just to replace it with something else, but to copy it fast, and all kinds of users, including true power users, copy URLs much more often than edit them.
    • blacksmith_tb 10y ago
      I'm sure that's the rationale, but 'true power users' likely hit meta-l to select the whole url anyhow, instead of using the mouse...
• jon-wood 10y ago
  The problem with configuration options is that they need maintaining indefinitely to accommodate a small proportion of the user population. That means testing behaviour with the flag on/off, and taking into account the possibility of that flag being on when dealing with bug reports. In this case it's a minor thing which probably wouldn't require much maintainance, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
  • blktiger 10y ago
    Agreed. Especially in a case like this where it's actually pretty trivial to write an extension for this behavior. This change decreases the maintenance of chromium, removes a non-obvious data-destroying keyboard shortcut, and still gives users the option of bringing the feature back if they want it.
  • shkkmo 10y ago
    In most cases that makes complete sense... but this behavior has been around so long. Adding a configuration option means they can track data on if this feature is being used and worth continuing to support. That said, I'm glad they finally did something to fix this bad UX design.
    • notatoad 10y ago
      >Adding a configuration option means they can track data on if this feature is being used and worth continuing to support leaving it enabled also allows them to do this, which they have done for the last couple years and clearly their data says that it's not worth supporting, because now they're dropping it.
  • _pferreir_ 10y ago
    This. Configuration flags increase complexity. Every time you change the feature in question (or add something that uses it) you will have to take into account every possible flag combination.
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
• Grishnakh 10y ago
  >while explaining impatiently why it's infeasible to make the now missing feature a configuration option. There's been a general trend in computing for a while now to not have any kind of configurability. You can see it in most of the major UIs now. And from what I've read on tech discussion forums, techies themselves absolutely hate configurability: they complain that they don't want to have to slog through a bunch of configuration options for everything, they want things to be set up to their preference out-of-the-box.
• __david__ 10y ago
  Re #2: my brother once released a fork of chromium where the only change was fixing the stupid "select the whole url bar on single click". People feel really strongly about certain features.
• acbabis 10y ago
  Add mandatory auto-fill in the omnibar to the list of grievances. If you do a search for "JavaScript" and then later perform a search for Java by typing "Java[Enter]", it will do a search for "JavaScript" instead, possibly before you have time to react. To prevent this, you have to stop before pressing [Enter] for each search to make sure it doesn't auto-fill, then press backspace if it did. This feature cannot be turned off, and the faster you are at typing, the more aggravating it is.
• kentonv 10y ago
  In Chrome, obscure configuration options are called "extensions". Instead of searching for them in "advanced settings", you search for them in the extension gallery. The great thing about extensions is that anyone can write them, so you aren't limited by whatever the Chrome team decides to provide.
• 746F7475 10y ago
  >it's infeasible to make the now missing feature a configuration option. Isn't Chromium opensource? I'm sure they'll accept your pull request.
• eloisant 10y ago
  When you have a product, you have 2 solutions: - Make changes that annoy some users - For fear of annoying anyone, keep adding without ever removing, increase the number of settings, in other words bloat. Until a new, "lighter" alternative products comes and everyone moves out from your bloated product So yes, by removing features that they realized weren't good one, they're keeping the product simple.