11 ms·
I do not have sufficient profanity in my verbal arsenal for websites that override basic, fundamental browser behaviour because they think they know better than
by blahedo 12y ago
I do not have sufficient profanity in my verbal arsenal for websites that override basic, fundamental browser behaviour because they think they know better than I do what I actually meant to do. I have noticed Medium being a regular perpetrator of this sort of broken behaviour before.
That one of the developers at Medium could run into such a glowing example of one of the many reasons it's nasty to override browser behaviour, and take the lesson from it that oh hey, we just need to make our override logic more complicated... the blindness and idiocy and sheer bloodymindedness of this response I just can't even.
Medium: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
- omaranto 12y agoIf you ask me web browser's stole CTRL+S! It used to mean "save my work", but in a browser it means "download a copy of the website I am viewing", which seems totally different to me. I can't remember ever wanting that behavior. I agree with you that websites shouldn't override useful browser behavior, but I'm OK with websites restoring CTRL+S to it's rightful meaning of saving my work.
- neohaven 12y agoIt means "Save the thing I'm looking at". Ctrl-S says to your browser "I want to save this".
- Shog9 12y agoExcept, it generally doesn't mean that either. It means "download the page again and save that - nevermind if what I'm looking at has changed since it was retrieved". Which also breaks the mental model of "save my work", even if you're just typing text into a form.
- cwyers 12y agoIt's a holdover from when people who made web browsers imagined them being used for browsing web pages, not as an application run time.
- na85 12y agoIt's a symptom of this latest "push all functionality to javascript" fad, and I can't wait until people wake up to the fact that it's just this generation's Flash. In-browser WYSIWYG or markdown editing is not good UX design. Period. Full stop. It's never been better than an offline text editor, and when you try to present a cross-browser experience, this is what inevitably happens.
- eatonphil 12y agoI wasn't around for it, but I feel like this same thing could be said for cross-platform compilers or VMs... Javascript is just newer. It seems like your argument in the second paragraph could be applied to the infant Java VM or GCC. It seems a little myopic.
- na85 12y agoI'm unaware of any GCC hotkeys.
- arjie 12y agoWhat is the right approach to have the in-browser editor save? Users may want to manually trigger a save because it makes them feel safe before they close a browser tab.
- gambiter 12y agoWhile I sympathize with a lot of the "don't usurp the browser" arguments, this is really the correct answer. Whether or not it is logical, the fact is we are software developers who create software for USERS.
- nothrabannosir 12y agoYes, you have all my votes. Words cannot describe the ire which consumes me when cute webdevs reinvent everything because it works on their industrial-grade computers with perfect internet. I agree. So. Much. But. It pains me to say this: what else would you want to have happen when a user presses Ctrl+S? Are they really wrong, here? Wouldn't a user expect a "save blog" on Ctrl+S? How would I explain to a non-tech user why Ctrl+S works in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, but not in Medium?
- acqq 12y agoUsers who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when writing documents. I don't know actually anybody who does. Autosave in Word functions as it should (not needing any user action) since at least 1998. My code editors and IDEs all do autosave too before compiling. What's the auctual benefit of ever using Ctrl-S in the middle of writing?
- lmm 12y agoI've lost too much data to trust to autosave. When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time (I write Scala, I don't have the RAM to do that) - I want it to wait for an explicit Ctrl-S to tell it that I've finished a meaningful section and it should compile now. I have exactly the same thing on prose.io (which I write on a lot, and which looks very similar to medium), where "saving" means creating a git commit - I don't want an automatic commit for every letter I type, but I do want to commit very frequently, after each paragraph or similar unit. Rather like when programming. It becomes a mental tic, an "I've finished the paragraph" instinct. And I'm very glad medium handles it.
- acqq 12y agoWhat do you use actually that doesn't have "undo"? I can "undo" the whole day of my work on the file until I close it in the IDE. Whatever is "lost" I can return to the previous point.
- cezarywojcik 12y agoWhile for the most part I agree with you, there are sometimes when it seems... appropriate. Take, for example, Google Docs. I'm used to hitting CTRL-S when working on just about any paper. If I had the save website dialog pop up every time I hit CTRL-S, I would start to get annoyed. I'm glad that Google Docs doesn't do that. A similar case can be made here.
- yen223 12y agoI can count with an amputated hand the number of times I had to save a website. Overriding the ctrl+S shortcut is the appropriate move here.
- coldpie 12y agoI wonder if the shortcut should be removed. Certainly some people use the feature, but it seems obscure enough that maybe we should pass that combination on to the website, instead.
- krzysz00 12y agoThe feature is rather useful for record-keeping purposes (also known as CYA).
- wlesieutre 12y agoThough you get an html file and a folder with all the external assets, which I find to be pretty annoying. Safari did a single .webarchive file, but I don't think anyone else ever standardized on something like that. It often wrecks the layout, but I tend to print to PDF rather than deal with saved html files.
- jarek 12y agoOpera and IE support MHTML (MIME HTML), it seems to work alright
- 12y ago
- jkot 12y agoThats why some people disable javascript.
- keeperofdakeys 12y agoI'm not sure if it's happening now, but at one point in time F5 wouldn't work to reload the page if twitter is loaded. And not to mention google plus, that swallows Ctrl+PgDown and Ctrl+PgUp, which happen to be shortcuts to move through tabs. So you are moving through tabs, then you suddenly stop, and you have to reach for the mouse.
- mahouse 12y agoNot only it would not reload the page, it would retweet the currently selected tweet. It was silly. But what's really silly is that the browser actually allows a webpage to override such a basic shortcut like F5.
- coldpie 12y agoGoogle's search results page hijacks all typed input without modifier keys. I often use / to begin an in-page-search in Firefox. But not on Google!
- igonvalue 12y agoI haven't used Medium, so I can't speak to it, but in my experience the most frustrating instance of this behavior is from Stack Overflow. Keybindings such as `Ctrl`+`k` and `Ctrl`+`b`, which are native to OS X, behave completely unexpectedly in Stack Overflow textareas, to the extent that I sometimes just give up and compose my text in an external editor.
- gknoy 12y agoI've grown accustomed to writing longer comments or posts in an external editor, simply because I've too frequently experienced browser crashes, or an inadvertent (or absent-minded) screen refresh. Alt-backspace is my worst offender, as I use that ALL the time in the shell for text editing, whereas in a browser it navigates backwards. Worst of all, I can't seem to find a way to alter the keybinds, or (more importantly) the mouse-5-means-go-back gesture.