19 ms·

Years back, every web browser's built-in password manager locked up the page when submitting a login form, waiting for the user to answer "do you want to save t

Years back, every web browser's built-in password manager locked up the page when submitting a login form, waiting for the user to answer "do you want to save this password?" before proceeding. I thought that was silly: how do I know if I want to save the password before I've seen whether it's correct? Which I can't see until the form is submitted. At the time I was using Opera, so I wrote in to their customer support suggesting that the prompt appear after the new page loaded. I never heard back, but a couple months later their next major release implemented exactly that behavior. A few months after that, every other browser followed suit. I can't have been the only one bothered by the existing behavior, but given how long browsers had worked that way before I wrote in, I like to tell myself that the timing wasn't a coincidence, and that my little suggestion rippled out into a change that made a small thing better for the whole world :)

em-bee 4y ago
i still see this behavior in firefox. the save password popup disappears by the time the page is loaded. and it baffles me every time how that is supposed to be useful.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  The stupid thing is that it already is async and not locking up like it was in the very old days op refers to. They were just so clever as to add a timeout after which that dialog closes, regardless of whether the page actually finished loading. So on a slower page you end up with the popup disappearing while the page is still (mostly) blank and you don't know yet whether the credentials were correct. I think just clicking in a blank spot (or the text fields) in that dialog stops the timeout, but it's one of these things I'm not actually sure about and it's almost like a cargo cult kind of ritual...
- kevincox 4y ago
  I find that it usually sticks around long enough. But I agree that it should stay open at least until I interact with something else. On the bright side it just collapses into a "key" icon in the URL bar that you can click to open it back up and save the password.
  - nl 4y ago
    > On the bright side it just collapses into a "key" icon in the URL bar that you can click to open it back up and save the password. I've been using Firefox as my main browser since 2010 and I never realized this.
- teekert 4y ago
  It’s like that Teams pop up that informs you that a colleague started a meeting, the one that always disappears after you finish typing your sentence and start to move your mouse towards it.
  - pacoverdi 4y ago
    you can click it right away, finish your sentence, then click again to join the meeting once you're done :]
    - teekert 4y ago
      Ha! Great tip indeed!
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  The most amusing (for me) behaviour is what OR I need to press Csncel everytime ( my preffered bahaviour, honestly, I don't save passwords) OR never see the dialog again (I'm totally okay with saving the pass for some LAN devices which would be never acessible from the net ever - but I can't)
fimdomeio 4y ago
I found a bug in firefox where the two letters of the weekdays appeared as 3 letters for portuguese (pt-PT). Eventually found that it was an error in the unicode standard, so submited the proposal for change. Probably there's dozen of people involved in this... but seeing it being changed brought me great joy. I was a tiny part in changing a tiny mostly irrelevant detail that was causing a slight inconvenience to millions of people daily. Improving humanity one bit at a time...
- pc86 4y ago
  This is great! Imagine how many people had no idea how to get something like that fixed yet noticed the bug.
- jackpirate 4y ago
  Do you happen to have a link to the proposal I can see and share with a class? I'm teaching a few lectures about some "weird" stuff this semester, and this would be a great example.
  - exikyut 4y ago
    FWIW searching https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ for "magic" finds a bunch of posts that might also fit with that topic. (The rest of the posts are an interesting rabbithole if you're not aware, apologies in advance)
  - O_H_E 4y ago
    Well, that's going to be a very cool class I best !
  - paulschreiber 4y ago
    I ran into a problem formatting numbers in the Italian locale back in 2014: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/langpack-locales/+bug/1279558 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/langpack-locales/+... It turned out to be a low-level bug in glibc: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10797 https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10797 It got fixed five years later, long after I had worked around it and left the job where I found the bug.
layer8 4y ago
This still sometimes happens on iOS Safari. I don’t know what is different about the pages where it happens, but it’s annoying.
- malshe 4y ago
  Even MacOS Safari does this. I don't know whether the latest update fixed it though.
ck2 4y ago
Every few years I get an automated email from Wordpress where someone finally fixed a bug I submitted over a decade ago, lol
akadruid1 4y ago
In a similar vein, I wrote to Microsoft suggesting their "Authenticator" TOTP app for Android would benefit from a search feature. I can't have been the only one, but it did make me happy when they actually implemented it a few months later
- teekert 4y ago
  I also suggested it but their iOS app still does not have it. Really annoying with >20 totp tokens.
thallavajhula 4y ago
Opera was the most innovative web browser ever. They brought so many new things to the world of web browsing. Tabbed-browsing, mouse gestures, colored tabs, browser themes, in-built security integration with anti-virus software, an extensible browser - so many wonderful innovative features. It was a paid software initially, but then they made it free for everyone. I used to use it as my default browser, maybe 13-15 years ago.
- abfan1127 4y ago
  its my default browser now. It still great!
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Well, I used to love Opera as well, it was my first "serious" browser as I became a netizen. But now I wouldn't even dare to try it as it's owned by a consortium of Chinese investors, rather than a Norwegian company.
    - bityard 4y ago
      Vivaldi is pretty good and though it's based on chromium, is the new opera in spirit.
      - IndrekR 4y ago
        No coincience. Vivaldi is co-founded by ex-CEO and co-founder of Opera. I quit using Opera after he did not keep his promise to swim across the Atlantic in 2005: https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swim/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi...
        copperx 4y ago
        > I quit using Opera after he did not keep his promise to swim across the Atlantic in 2005: https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi... Congratulations. This is the most persnickety HN comment I've read. And I've been here more than a decade.
bitwize 4y ago
I discovered a bug in Java 1.0.1's GridBagLayout and posted about it to USENET. It was fixed in JDK 1.0.3. I also emailed the GIMP maintainers about a bug in their select color region tool in GIMP 0.99.x that made it ignore 1-pixel-wide barriers. By 1.0 it was fixed. I was chuffed when it happened, but the internet was a smaller, chummier place back then, so we expected that kind of response more than we do today, I think.
jbverschoor 4y ago
I submit suggestions, features, bugs, detailed reports, new use cases etc. I'm more than happy to write detailed submissions, or do some traces when there's a bug. But if I notice there's no feedback or implementation within a reasonable period of time, I will stop doing that ever again for that company (large, small, doesn't matter). I refuse to waste my energy on that kind of process.
OinkEsFabuloso 4y ago
Oh, that's so cool! :-) Could you please write to Whatsapp or Telegram and ask them not to delete the EXIF information from shared images on their platform? I understand that they compress images so they don't take too long to transmit and load, but I think there's a big group of their users (especially for Whatsapp) that use their platform to share family pictures. For this purpose, having the EXIF date (if it's available) could be very handy, since the picture could be properly timestamped and archived without having to ask again to the original poster for the specific files.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  As a general privacy rule I like stripping this by default. Couldn't you just zip up some images to retain this?
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  I think the EXIF data is removed because, for the vast majority of people that don't think to remove it, it's a safety risk. Posting a picture of your house? Your kid arriving at their first day of school? Some other location you'd rather a bad person not have info on? Most people don't think to remove that data before posting (and sometimes post directly from their phone camera?)... removing that data removes a lot of risk for them. Leaving it in is only considered a small benefit to a smaller subset of people (comparatively)
  - OinkEsFabuloso 4y ago
    We could always strip the location information (or any other identifying data like camera/phone model). But I can't see how having the date information attached to the image could be a safety risk. Especially when that information is already available within the app. The issue is that the app's UI is cumbersome to provide both pieces of information at the same time for a set of images.
- nl 4y ago
  Oh no this is a bad idea. There's a bunch of data (including location!) that is often included in EXIF.
levymetal 4y ago
And now we’ve come full-circle as 1Password 8 requires you to save your password prior to submitting the form instead of offering to save it after submission. Which is a huge regression as it results in this exact issue all over again. https://support.1password.com/save-fill-passwords/ https://support.1password.com/save-fill-passwords/
- brianpan 4y ago
  I just did a whole test because I missed the fact that you said 1Password 8. I'm still on 1Password 7: https://imgur.com/a/WpeffJE https://imgur.com/a/WpeffJE
- mstade 4y ago
  Sadly, 1Password seems to just get worse and worse in terms of usability with each release. The latest incarnation has so many little annoyances that makes me seriously consider switching. The one thing it's got going for it that really is kind of a killer feature for me is SSH key handling. It's super nice being able to sign your commits with Touch ID. Everything else is meh at best.
  - limelight 4y ago
    It's truly baffling how they manage to consistently make the software worse every single release. I was a huge fan of 1Password many years ago (and have been happy to pay for it throughout), but each successive release is more confusing and less reliable.
    - _HMCB_ 4y ago
      Agreed. Especially on iOS has it become obtrusive. Form inputs being obscured by mini pop-ups. I could go on. I’m waiting for the release of the new macOS and I’m going to evaluate using the native implementation and ditching 1P.
      - pasc1878 4y ago
        The promlem with using apple password management on macos is that I need vertical tabs. Only vivaldi and Firefox provide them now and they don't use the macos key chain
WalterBright 4y ago
If only Roku and Android TV boxes had a way to display pdf's on the TV! Hint hint hint!!! After all, they can display movies, pictures, and music. PDFs, please! I'd even pay for it.
- flatiron 4y ago
  I understand it not working on a Roku but why couldn’t you use an android pdf reader?
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    I looked up the android tv box on Amazon. Doesn't support pdfs.
- lots2learn 4y ago
  You could always open the pdf on your phone and cast your phone screen.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Yes, and I could hook up my laptop to the TV, too. But I bought the Roku box because it's so much more convenient than dinking around with the laptop.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  I usually cast them from my ipad to the tv. My ipad may be a very expensive PDF reader but it's bloody good at it.
tamiral 4y ago
you are literally one of my new fav people !
sixothree 4y ago
During the Edge beta in transition to Chromium engine, I requested they add green to the icon. I did get an automated thank you when it was finally released. That really made my day.

em-bee 4y ago

i still see this behavior in firefox. the save password popup disappears by the time the page is loaded. and it baffles me every time how that is supposed to be useful.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
iforgotpassword 4y ago
The stupid thing is that it already is async and not locking up like it was in the very old days op refers to. They were just so clever as to add a timeout after which that dialog closes, regardless of whether the page actually finished loading. So on a slower page you end up with the popup disappearing while the page is still (mostly) blank and you don't know yet whether the credentials were correct. I think just clicking in a blank spot (or the text fields) in that dialog stops the timeout, but it's one of these things I'm not actually sure about and it's almost like a cargo cult kind of ritual...
kevincox 4y ago
I find that it usually sticks around long enough. But I agree that it should stay open at least until I interact with something else. On the bright side it just collapses into a "key" icon in the URL bar that you can click to open it back up and save the password.
- nl 4y ago
  > On the bright side it just collapses into a "key" icon in the URL bar that you can click to open it back up and save the password. I've been using Firefox as my main browser since 2010 and I never realized this.
teekert 4y ago
It’s like that Teams pop up that informs you that a colleague started a meeting, the one that always disappears after you finish typing your sentence and start to move your mouse towards it.
- pacoverdi 4y ago
  you can click it right away, finish your sentence, then click again to join the meeting once you're done :]
  - teekert 4y ago
    Ha! Great tip indeed!
justsomehnguy 4y ago
The most amusing (for me) behaviour is what OR I need to press Csncel everytime ( my preffered bahaviour, honestly, I don't save passwords) OR never see the dialog again (I'm totally okay with saving the pass for some LAN devices which would be never acessible from the net ever - but I can't)

fimdomeio 4y ago

I found a bug in firefox where the two letters of the weekdays appeared as 3 letters for portuguese (pt-PT). Eventually found that it was an error in the unicode standard, so submited the proposal for change. Probably there's dozen of people involved in this... but seeing it being changed brought me great joy. I was a tiny part in changing a tiny mostly irrelevant detail that was causing a slight inconvenience to millions of people daily. Improving humanity one bit at a time...

pc86 4y ago
This is great! Imagine how many people had no idea how to get something like that fixed yet noticed the bug.
jackpirate 4y ago
Do you happen to have a link to the proposal I can see and share with a class? I'm teaching a few lectures about some "weird" stuff this semester, and this would be a great example.
- exikyut 4y ago
  FWIW searching https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ for "magic" finds a bunch of posts that might also fit with that topic. (The rest of the posts are an interesting rabbithole if you're not aware, apologies in advance)
- O_H_E 4y ago
  Well, that's going to be a very cool class I best !
- paulschreiber 4y ago
  I ran into a problem formatting numbers in the Italian locale back in 2014: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/langpack-locales/+bug/1279558 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/langpack-locales/+... It turned out to be a low-level bug in glibc: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10797 https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10797 It got fixed five years later, long after I had worked around it and left the job where I found the bug.

layer8 4y ago

This still sometimes happens on iOS Safari. I don’t know what is different about the pages where it happens, but it’s annoying.

malshe 4y ago
Even MacOS Safari does this. I don't know whether the latest update fixed it though.

ck2 4y ago

Every few years I get an automated email from Wordpress where someone finally fixed a bug I submitted over a decade ago, lol

akadruid1 4y ago

In a similar vein, I wrote to Microsoft suggesting their "Authenticator" TOTP app for Android would benefit from a search feature. I can't have been the only one, but it did make me happy when they actually implemented it a few months later

teekert 4y ago
I also suggested it but their iOS app still does not have it. Really annoying with >20 totp tokens.

thallavajhula 4y ago

Opera was the most innovative web browser ever. They brought so many new things to the world of web browsing. Tabbed-browsing, mouse gestures, colored tabs, browser themes, in-built security integration with anti-virus software, an extensible browser - so many wonderful innovative features. It was a paid software initially, but then they made it free for everyone. I used to use it as my default browser, maybe 13-15 years ago.

abfan1127 4y ago
its my default browser now. It still great!
- capableweb 4y ago
  Well, I used to love Opera as well, it was my first "serious" browser as I became a netizen. But now I wouldn't even dare to try it as it's owned by a consortium of Chinese investors, rather than a Norwegian company.
  - bityard 4y ago
    Vivaldi is pretty good and though it's based on chromium, is the new opera in spirit.
    - IndrekR 4y ago
      No coincience. Vivaldi is co-founded by ex-CEO and co-founder of Opera. I quit using Opera after he did not keep his promise to swim across the Atlantic in 2005: https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swim/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi...
      - copperx 4y ago
        > I quit using Opera after he did not keep his promise to swim across the Atlantic in 2005: https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi... Congratulations. This is the most persnickety HN comment I've read. And I've been here more than a decade.

bitwize 4y ago

I discovered a bug in Java 1.0.1's GridBagLayout and posted about it to USENET. It was fixed in JDK 1.0.3. I also emailed the GIMP maintainers about a bug in their select color region tool in GIMP 0.99.x that made it ignore 1-pixel-wide barriers. By 1.0 it was fixed. I was chuffed when it happened, but the internet was a smaller, chummier place back then, so we expected that kind of response more than we do today, I think.

jbverschoor 4y ago

I submit suggestions, features, bugs, detailed reports, new use cases etc. I'm more than happy to write detailed submissions, or do some traces when there's a bug. But if I notice there's no feedback or implementation within a reasonable period of time, I will stop doing that ever again for that company (large, small, doesn't matter). I refuse to waste my energy on that kind of process.

OinkEsFabuloso 4y ago

Oh, that's so cool! :-) Could you please write to Whatsapp or Telegram and ask them not to delete the EXIF information from shared images on their platform? I understand that they compress images so they don't take too long to transmit and load, but I think there's a big group of their users (especially for Whatsapp) that use their platform to share family pictures. For this purpose, having the EXIF date (if it's available) could be very handy, since the picture could be properly timestamped and archived without having to ask again to the original poster for the specific files.

nkozyra 4y ago
As a general privacy rule I like stripping this by default. Couldn't you just zip up some images to retain this?
RHSeeger 4y ago
I think the EXIF data is removed because, for the vast majority of people that don't think to remove it, it's a safety risk. Posting a picture of your house? Your kid arriving at their first day of school? Some other location you'd rather a bad person not have info on? Most people don't think to remove that data before posting (and sometimes post directly from their phone camera?)... removing that data removes a lot of risk for them. Leaving it in is only considered a small benefit to a smaller subset of people (comparatively)
- OinkEsFabuloso 4y ago
  We could always strip the location information (or any other identifying data like camera/phone model). But I can't see how having the date information attached to the image could be a safety risk. Especially when that information is already available within the app. The issue is that the app's UI is cumbersome to provide both pieces of information at the same time for a set of images.
nl 4y ago
Oh no this is a bad idea. There's a bunch of data (including location!) that is often included in EXIF.

levymetal 4y ago

And now we’ve come full-circle as 1Password 8 requires you to save your password prior to submitting the form instead of offering to save it after submission. Which is a huge regression as it results in this exact issue all over again. https://support.1password.com/save-fill-passwords/ https://support.1password.com/save-fill-passwords/

brianpan 4y ago
I just did a whole test because I missed the fact that you said 1Password 8. I'm still on 1Password 7: https://imgur.com/a/WpeffJE https://imgur.com/a/WpeffJE
mstade 4y ago
Sadly, 1Password seems to just get worse and worse in terms of usability with each release. The latest incarnation has so many little annoyances that makes me seriously consider switching. The one thing it's got going for it that really is kind of a killer feature for me is SSH key handling. It's super nice being able to sign your commits with Touch ID. Everything else is meh at best.
- limelight 4y ago
  It's truly baffling how they manage to consistently make the software worse every single release. I was a huge fan of 1Password many years ago (and have been happy to pay for it throughout), but each successive release is more confusing and less reliable.
  - _HMCB_ 4y ago
    Agreed. Especially on iOS has it become obtrusive. Form inputs being obscured by mini pop-ups. I could go on. I’m waiting for the release of the new macOS and I’m going to evaluate using the native implementation and ditching 1P.
    - pasc1878 4y ago
      The promlem with using apple password management on macos is that I need vertical tabs. Only vivaldi and Firefox provide them now and they don't use the macos key chain

WalterBright 4y ago

If only Roku and Android TV boxes had a way to display pdf's on the TV! Hint hint hint!!! After all, they can display movies, pictures, and music. PDFs, please! I'd even pay for it.

flatiron 4y ago
I understand it not working on a Roku but why couldn’t you use an android pdf reader?
- WalterBright 4y ago
  I looked up the android tv box on Amazon. Doesn't support pdfs.
lots2learn 4y ago
You could always open the pdf on your phone and cast your phone screen.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Yes, and I could hook up my laptop to the TV, too. But I bought the Roku box because it's so much more convenient than dinking around with the laptop.
mhh__ 4y ago
I usually cast them from my ipad to the tv. My ipad may be a very expensive PDF reader but it's bloody good at it.

tamiral 4y ago

you are literally one of my new fav people !

sixothree 4y ago

During the Edge beta in transition to Chromium engine, I requested they add green to the icon. I did get an automated thank you when it was finally released. That really made my day.