4 ms·

While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software develope

While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software developers for the sake of pleasing the lowest common denominator users who just gets used to whatever UI they learned first and now all future programmers are forced to copy that UI, no matter how bad it is for future generations to come.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Well, that doesn't apply here because gifs still have better UX than video for many use cases. Nobody wants to use video as it's implemented right now for reaction gifs. Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. These aren't "lowest common denominator" things. They're everyone things.
- wolrah 6y ago
  > Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Uh... Right click, "Save video as..." in Chrome. Has been that way as long as I can recall. I'm 95% sure Firefox works the same way. No idea about IE or OG Edge because who really cares, presumably Edgium behaves like Chrome. A lot of sites override the right click menu in one way or another, but that's not the browser's fault. A standard video embed is easy to save. > Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. I think that might run in to some practical limitations, both in terms of simple clipboard data limits and the fact that while an image is loaded entirely in to RAM to play a video may not be. If the user does a right-click>copy five seconds in while the video is still loading but has already started playing, what should the browser do? How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie? Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    If the right click menu itself is the problem, that kind of is the browser's fault. Especially when firefox has an override for that, pressing shift. > Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images. Copy is already broken and weird for images, since it doesn't get you the original file. But if you fixed that, I would expect pasting to give me a 'transferring...' window as long as the browser is still open and it can't be fed from cache. That wouldn't be particularly hard to implement. (And being unable to feed from cache wouldn't be unique to video at all. Image downloads already ignore the cache all the time.)
  - deeblering4 6y ago
    > How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie? You can’t yet. Thats the point. GIFs are not 100GB 4K movies, yet the current state of the art treats the two the same. We need a standard method to distinguish an (optionally) looping, soundless “GIF” video from a traditional video, and mimic the behavior of an image in the case of a GIF. Also GIF videos needs to behave like GIF images consistently across all modern browsers and mobile devices.
- debaserab2 6y ago
  And as long as licensed video codecs are a thing, the UX for gif's will always be better. Yes, videos lose quality and sound when converted to a gif. They also lose proprietary encoding and all their metadata (including licensing information). This makes gif's infinitely more transmittable on the web.
S_A_P 6y ago
Just depends on whether or not there is a genuine usability and discoverability improvement or not. Most new UI is trending towards way worse. Particularly in mobile.
toast0 6y ago
When you run the user studies to tell me what's good, I'll believe you. Until then, I'm using the last published user studies which were Microsoft's work leading up to Windows 95. :P

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Well, that doesn't apply here because gifs still have better UX than video for many use cases. Nobody wants to use video as it's implemented right now for reaction gifs. Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. These aren't "lowest common denominator" things. They're everyone things.

wolrah 6y ago
> Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Uh... Right click, "Save video as..." in Chrome. Has been that way as long as I can recall. I'm 95% sure Firefox works the same way. No idea about IE or OG Edge because who really cares, presumably Edgium behaves like Chrome. A lot of sites override the right click menu in one way or another, but that's not the browser's fault. A standard video embed is easy to save. > Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. I think that might run in to some practical limitations, both in terms of simple clipboard data limits and the fact that while an image is loaded entirely in to RAM to play a video may not be. If the user does a right-click>copy five seconds in while the video is still loading but has already started playing, what should the browser do? How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie? Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  If the right click menu itself is the problem, that kind of is the browser's fault. Especially when firefox has an override for that, pressing shift. > Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images. Copy is already broken and weird for images, since it doesn't get you the original file. But if you fixed that, I would expect pasting to give me a 'transferring...' window as long as the browser is still open and it can't be fed from cache. That wouldn't be particularly hard to implement. (And being unable to feed from cache wouldn't be unique to video at all. Image downloads already ignore the cache all the time.)
- deeblering4 6y ago
  > How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie? You can’t yet. Thats the point. GIFs are not 100GB 4K movies, yet the current state of the art treats the two the same. We need a standard method to distinguish an (optionally) looping, soundless “GIF” video from a traditional video, and mimic the behavior of an image in the case of a GIF. Also GIF videos needs to behave like GIF images consistently across all modern browsers and mobile devices.
debaserab2 6y ago
And as long as licensed video codecs are a thing, the UX for gif's will always be better. Yes, videos lose quality and sound when converted to a gif. They also lose proprietary encoding and all their metadata (including licensing information). This makes gif's infinitely more transmittable on the web.

S_A_P 6y ago

Just depends on whether or not there is a genuine usability and discoverability improvement or not. Most new UI is trending towards way worse. Particularly in mobile.

toast0 6y ago

When you run the user studies to tell me what's good, I'll believe you. Until then, I'm using the last published user studies which were Microsoft's work leading up to Windows 95. :P