Posted by phil294 10 hours ago
Another annoyance is that many web forms (and desktop apps based on web tech) don’t automatically place the keyboard focus in an input field anymore when first displayed. This is also an antipattern on mobile, that even on screens that only have one or two text inputs, and where the previous action clearly expressed that you want to perform a step that requires entering something, you first have to tap on the input field for the keyboard to appear, so that you can start entering the requested information.
The other day I used Safari on a newly setup macOS machine for the first time in probably a decade. Of course wanted to browse HN, and eventually wanted to write a comment. Wrote a bunch of stuff, and by muscle memory, hit tab then enter.
Guess what happened instead of "submitted the comment"? Tab on macOS Safari apparently jumps up to the addressbar (???), and then of course you press Enter so it reloads the page, and everything you wrote disappears. I'm gonna admit, I did the same time just minutes later again, then I gave up using Safari for any sort of browsing and downloaded Firefox instead.
And this highlights something that I think the author glosses over a little but is part of why idioms break for a lot of web applications. A lot of the keyboard commands we're used to issue commands to the OS and so their idioms are generally defined by the idioms of the OS. A web application, by nature of being an application within an application, has to try to intercept or override those commands. It's the same problem that linux (and windows) face with key commands shared by their terminals and their GUIs. Is "ctrl-c" copy or interrupt? Depends on what has focus right now, and both are "idiomatic" for their particular environments. macOS neatly sidesteps this for terminals because "ctrl-c" was never used for copy, it was always "cmd-c".
Incidentally, what you're looking for in Safari is either "Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage" setting in the Advanced settings tab. By default with that off, you would use "opt-Tab" to navigate to all elements.
I'm not sure why this isn't the default, but this allows for UI navigation via keyboard on macOS, including Safari.
laughs in linux wouldn’t that be nice.
All of these people who keep saying that webapps can replace desktop applications were simply never desktop power users. They don’t know what they don’t know.
I wish more people would avoid or at least introduce abbreviations that may be unfamiliar to the audience.
I don't care about the new features in a browser update. Ideally, nothing at all has changed.
I don't want a "tour" of the software I just installed. I, presumably, installed it to do something, and I just want to do that thing.
I don't want to have to select a preference for how a specific action is performed in your software. If it's not what I expected, I will learn it.
And for the love of GOD, nobody wants to subscribe to your newsletter.
If you inset an unobtrusive newsletter button 60% of the way through the article, perhaps I'll actually click it (or, more realistically, follow your RSS feed).
Are you serious? Nothing has come close to it. Yeah we have higher resolution screens, but everything else is much less legible and accessible than that screenshot.