8 ms·

At a previous company we had someone angrily call in with a bug. We had moved a button several pixels and this broke some automation they had built which relied

At a previous company we had someone angrily call in with a bug. We had moved a button several pixels and this broke some automation they had built which relied on the pixel coordinates of the button. It was exactly as dumb as it sounded. So I don't see much reason for Netflix have a deprecation cycle for undocumented functionality that a third party extension relies on. If you want to rely on internals, don't be surprised when they change.

spaceribs 5y ago
I'm specifically trying to avoid a bad integration though, the API for <video> is quite clear for how to interact with a <video> element hosted on a page, as defined by the HTML5 spec. This is the issue I have with this change, I'm following all the rules here and those rules apply to every video provider on the web for rendering video. While I don't think it was purposeful, it certainly needs to be called out that crashing the entire page is certainly nonstandard behavior for a <video> element.
- bredren 5y ago
  Fwiw, you can’t even trust the browsers to handle HTML5 media spec behavior the same way. I just dealt with cross-browser issues in how setting currentTime on <audio> is handled because I needed a player to resume from a preset time. On WebKit browsers, including desktop safari and all iOS browsers, you must wait for the ‘dataloadded’ or ‘canplay’ events to fire before trying to set currentTime. On desktop Firefox / Chrome, you must set currentTime immediately prior to .play() or it won’t pick it up.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
syshum 5y ago
At my company humans will complain if you move a button because most people operate on their own muscle memory, any time Microsoft, or some other software vendors moves a button, no matter how small, we get ends less complains, automation is not needed. For automation, this is likely because you company did not provide proper official API do to proper automation. Many companies do not, nexflix does not. So people have to hack around internals to make the things do what they want. I am still at a loose why companies, and devs are such control freaks they only want people to use their software / hardware in the exact way they want them do, offering no other control options, automation API;s or any other "power" features". It is their way or the highway... and screw you if you do not like it
- x0x0 5y ago
  To give you some perspective from a user: The GSuite (or whatever they call it these days) google groups UI is hot garbage. However, I finally figured out how to open a group -- effectively a mailing list -- to the public internet. This was carefully documented in our internal wiki because, again, UI is hot garbage. Google has too many PMs, so someone decided to go screw with the UI. It is now not much easier, but it is different, so I had to spend another hour figuring out how to do the same thing. For your "convenience" as a customer, the change has invalidated the vast majority of help text on the internet helping users work around the deficiencies in Google's UI. And that is why users hate change: the previous UI might not have been good, but we'd already figured out how to use it. So a change creates work with zero benefit to us.
  - syshum 5y ago
    Yea, I love Microsoft Documentation [/s]. There has been more than a few times I have been trying to do something in azure, following the official Microsoft documentation which says something like "Click this button, then in the submenu choose X" except the button is not there, and the submenu has been moved....
zmj 5y ago
> At a previous company we had someone angrily call in with a bug. We had moved a button several pixels and this broke some automation they had built which relied on the pixel coordinates of the button. This is part of why Windows doesn't update the old Control Panel screens - the UI is the API for automation like this, and backwards compatibility matters more than consistency.
- Cyphase 5y ago
  I don't find that particularly hard to believe, but do you have a reference for this?
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  A slight tangent: I know I'm not the only one who considers the old control panels to be far superior to the new ones, even if Microsoft disagrees. The new UIs won't allow you to keep open the Bluetooth config panel at the same time as the Windows Update config panel, for instance, as they share the One True Config Window. You can only view one at a time. A little ironic for an operating system named for its ability to run multiple UIs at once. Fortunately many of the old config UIs are still there on Windows 10, especially for more advanced points of configuration. I imagine the old UIs are also more resource-efficient, for what that's worth, following the usual trend with UI toolkits.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    KDE now won't let you open multiple settings pages at once either, unless you run kcmshell5 from a terminal.
  - bombela 5y ago
    And the fact that the old control panels can display so much information and controls in such a compact form. While all the new UI stuff needs full screen and scroll bars on my 4k screen to display 5 toggle and few sentences.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago

spaceribs 5y ago

I'm specifically trying to avoid a bad integration though, the API for <video> is quite clear for how to interact with a <video> element hosted on a page, as defined by the HTML5 spec. This is the issue I have with this change, I'm following all the rules here and those rules apply to every video provider on the web for rendering video. While I don't think it was purposeful, it certainly needs to be called out that crashing the entire page is certainly nonstandard behavior for a <video> element.

bredren 5y ago
Fwiw, you can’t even trust the browsers to handle HTML5 media spec behavior the same way. I just dealt with cross-browser issues in how setting currentTime on <audio> is handled because I needed a player to resume from a preset time. On WebKit browsers, including desktop safari and all iOS browsers, you must wait for the ‘dataloadded’ or ‘canplay’ events to fire before trying to set currentTime. On desktop Firefox / Chrome, you must set currentTime immediately prior to .play() or it won’t pick it up.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

syshum 5y ago

At my company humans will complain if you move a button because most people operate on their own muscle memory, any time Microsoft, or some other software vendors moves a button, no matter how small, we get ends less complains, automation is not needed. For automation, this is likely because you company did not provide proper official API do to proper automation. Many companies do not, nexflix does not. So people have to hack around internals to make the things do what they want. I am still at a loose why companies, and devs are such control freaks they only want people to use their software / hardware in the exact way they want them do, offering no other control options, automation API;s or any other "power" features". It is their way or the highway... and screw you if you do not like it

x0x0 5y ago
To give you some perspective from a user: The GSuite (or whatever they call it these days) google groups UI is hot garbage. However, I finally figured out how to open a group -- effectively a mailing list -- to the public internet. This was carefully documented in our internal wiki because, again, UI is hot garbage. Google has too many PMs, so someone decided to go screw with the UI. It is now not much easier, but it is different, so I had to spend another hour figuring out how to do the same thing. For your "convenience" as a customer, the change has invalidated the vast majority of help text on the internet helping users work around the deficiencies in Google's UI. And that is why users hate change: the previous UI might not have been good, but we'd already figured out how to use it. So a change creates work with zero benefit to us.
- syshum 5y ago
  Yea, I love Microsoft Documentation [/s]. There has been more than a few times I have been trying to do something in azure, following the official Microsoft documentation which says something like "Click this button, then in the submenu choose X" except the button is not there, and the submenu has been moved....

zmj 5y ago

> At a previous company we had someone angrily call in with a bug. We had moved a button several pixels and this broke some automation they had built which relied on the pixel coordinates of the button. This is part of why Windows doesn't update the old Control Panel screens - the UI is the API for automation like this, and backwards compatibility matters more than consistency.

Cyphase 5y ago
I don't find that particularly hard to believe, but do you have a reference for this?
MaxBarraclough 5y ago
A slight tangent: I know I'm not the only one who considers the old control panels to be far superior to the new ones, even if Microsoft disagrees. The new UIs won't allow you to keep open the Bluetooth config panel at the same time as the Windows Update config panel, for instance, as they share the One True Config Window. You can only view one at a time. A little ironic for an operating system named for its ability to run multiple UIs at once. Fortunately many of the old config UIs are still there on Windows 10, especially for more advanced points of configuration. I imagine the old UIs are also more resource-efficient, for what that's worth, following the usual trend with UI toolkits.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  KDE now won't let you open multiple settings pages at once either, unless you run kcmshell5 from a terminal.
- bombela 5y ago
  And the fact that the old control panels can display so much information and controls in such a compact form. While all the new UI stuff needs full screen and scroll bars on my 4k screen to display 5 toggle and few sentences.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago