oh look, it’s a government getting involved with big tech and improving the lives of its citizens. Funny how the just let the market decide folk suddenly go quiet on threads like this.
There's a lot of keyboard shortcuts that mean one thing in the browser but something totally different in another application. Now that it is common for many of these other applications to now be a web app, these keyboard short cuts are possible to start colliding.
Take GoogDocs as an example. Do you want the browser's find or the app's find if you hit ctrl-f in a Doc/Sheet/etc? The vast majority of the users want the app's. Reading a news site, most people would probably expect ctrl-f for the browser's search.
Just pointing out that hard rules will always have exceptions. Except for the TFA's point of copy/paste. Stop manipulating my clipboard with bullshit marketing/tracking bullshit!!!!!!!
why is all of the sudden ctrl-s wrong by the browser?? you make no sense here. you've never needed to save a web page? i guess i'm showing my age, while i don't use it daily, it has been a valuable feature for many reasons before.
Edit: >Then the vast majority of users are wrong.
I strongly disagree, and people unwilling to be flexible ruins the experience as those people tend to be the minority
You’re absolutely correct though, the parent comment seems to think there are absolute right and wrong answers for UI. I think that’s just not true, a good UI is one that works for your customers.
Of course there are absolute right and wrong answers for UI. Accessibility, minimum text contrast and font size, minimum size for clickable items. Keyboard shortcuts may not be (or may be) one of them, but in fact consistency across applications _is_ considered a hallmark of good UI and every Human Interface Guideline I've ever read, including open source ones such as that from KDE, specify such.
You're being obtuse. Even most of those you list will not reasonably have a fixed, absolute value that is right for all users, all applications, and all situations, and assuming they do is the cause of a lot of awful UI limitations.
(Your user will never need characters to render as single pixels? Try again - sooner or later someone will decide to abuse your spreadsheet as a raytracer and be annoyed they can't make cells single pixel)
And a feeling of consistentency often requires exceptions for specific cases such as the example of "find" where few users want to specifically find what happens to be in the browsers idea of what the document currently contains, but what it logically contains in their model of what it should contain. Consistency means that in an app that dynamically updates a scrollable region, for example, it should still find things in the currently not part of the browser document bits, and so shouldn't use the browsers find in those cases.
Some users might want a shortcut that always does the browsers own find, and there generally ought to be ways to override the app, but consistently acting how the user will want is rarely compatible with absolute rules.
I agree with almost all of the specific examples you give, but I think I agree _because_ those UI decisions work better for customers, and not because they are absolute right and wrong. I think I can illustrate this with some examples:
1. Consider a keyboard without an f-key, eg Arabic. If the user is using an Arabic keyboard, what should bring up the browsers 'find' functionality. Of course ctrl-f won't cut it. Perhaps it should be ctrl-[first letter of 'find' in Arabic]? Or perhaps ctrl-[the letter in the same position as f on qwerty keyboard]? It makes sense to follow convention if one is already established for Arabic, but then what about languages that are new to the web?
2. Consider a phone-tree, which is a sort of UI. For this UI, the 'absolute right answers' of minimum text contrast, font size, keyboard shortcuts, etc, make no sense, but there are surely other ways to make the UI work well for customers.
In both these scenarios, I feel the 'right' choice is to pick the UI that is best for users. I think there isn't a-priori a right answer, and users habits change over time and across cultures, so it's not necessarily an easy choice.
It's also trivial to use Ctrl+F on such pages if you so choose by clicking into the URL bar and then doing the keyboard combo. (Or just make two clicks in the browser menu.)
Discourse apps bind the first hit of Ctrl/cmd-f to the app's search feature, and then the second passes through and hits the browsers. Seems to be the right way to do it
There are semi-legitimate cases where this is warranted. For instance when looking at a Notion database, standard Ctrl-F is almost useless, and document search needs to go through the notion API to return results, sometimes even related to the entries that are displayed on screen.
I say "semi-legitimate" because I actually wish they'd map to a different shortcut, but can see the case for user wanted the remapping.
This of course stems from earlier decisions to have that document handling style in the first place. IMHO it becomes a complex debate when on line between an online application and a webpage.
Recently learned that if you Ctrl-F again after the highjacking, it brings up the browser search box.
Discovered this thanks to a site (don't remember which) that included a tooltip about this fact in their hijacked search box. I was curious if it would work on Redocly search, which has no such tooltip, and it did. I'm not positive if this works universally, or is just an undocumented feature of Redocly's interface and won't work in places the developers didn't make specific accommodations for it.
I just don't get it why browsers allow websites to override their own hotkeys. I'm sure it even required extra code to be written to work correctly.
Linear hijacks Cmd+F for example, very helpfully providing some terrible thing instead of my browser's built-in search that works the same everywhere. (it's the same Linear that thinks you can't not want wysiwyg markdown editing)
Well, for Ctrl+F there is sometimes a reason. Many websites uses technique called virtualization of lists. That boosts performance, but standard Ctrl+F doesn't works anymore properly
I know of 2 websites that do this.
1. Confluence
It's super annoying and takes up a lot of screen space
2. Nexus
It simply kills it. You can use ctrl-f but it simply will not find text right in front of you..
DOS emulator and Vim emulator, and that's almost all I can imagine. Maybe games that would use the control key as an additional input---but in the browser???
FWIW, the / search isn't part of Tridactyl but we do inject some code that frees up / from most websites so Firefox can use it.
It's possible to write your own user script to do it (you just need to add a keypress event handler that does preventDefault() and maybe stopPropagation()) with no need for Tridactyl :)
But it still doesn't seem to work on GitHub, did you whitelist GitHub for the preventDefault or is GitHub just a bit extra when it comes to hijacking keybinds?
Ah bummers, but nonetheless thanks for implementing this feature!
EDIT: I just took a look at GitHub's source code, and they mentioned a setting to turn off these shortcuts, and it really exists!! Under https://github.com/settings/accessibility one can turn off, all "Character keys" which means shortcuts without a modifier. I've never used them, so I just disabled it, and now forward slash always opens the Firefox search :0
We're talking about you, Slack.
(At least I can now remember which app is the one that breaks Cmd-K, but it's still annoying that I have to think that little bit longer to recall that info. every single time I press Cmd-K anywhere)
My personal hate is when webpages rebind scrolling to zoom.
I haven't used a mouse in almost 15 years. It's a constant source of annoyance when I try to scroll something with a map with my trackpad and it goes crazy zooming in and out.
Stripe docs do that and it annoys me to no end. They let you use the native search if you press ctrl+f a second time but since there is a delay it causes chaos.
In that case, I'd highly recommend browsing through the drop down menus for any of your apps. It is very common* for the keyboard shortcut to be listed, and very frustrating when it is not. This is my primary source for finding these shortcuts for a new app.
I don't think anyone here can imagine my bewilderment, confusion, and ultimately anger, the day I discovered that in the web interface for Outlook, Ctrl+V is the default shortcut for... send email.
I would very much like to know what went through their heads when they decided on that. On further thought, maybe I don't.
"Find in page" will only show a result if it is visible on the page (even though the scrollbar indicates the full vault has loaded, and even after scrolling down to the desired result and then back up).
They have a "Search vault" field that works fine, so it's not a major inconvenience, but the first few times I've Ctrl+F'd a newly added site and gotten "Phrase not found" when I know I added credentials? That's a mild anxiety I'd rather not have.
I could be convinced there's a security-related reason for this---in fact, I never really thought about it until now---but then I'd assume anyone able to get access to your vault can use Selenium and fill in the "Search vault" input field.
as ironic as it might seem given my mental health
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M
If you are able to make your childern happy ,that is what matters. My parents always provided for us but never fostered a happy household.
Death will come for us eventually,happiness is what matters (I have learnt the hard way!!)
I was on a call this morning where a team had decided to break it to their leadership that genai was not the answer they thought it was going to be. I bet there's going to be a lot of that this year.
This is what is so frustrating about this technology. Everyone seems completely convinced this is going to be bigger than sliced bread but a year later, I haven't seen a truly good killer app. A year ago we had chatgpt, co-pilot, mid journey, and stable diffusion, and today we have basically the some products. I've seen a lot of bad code, a lot of boring prose, and a lot of bad art. Meanwhile there's people breathlessly telling us we'll get agi in 5 years.
That certainly wasn't Microsoft, they're still full on the "CoPilot" hype train, launching a confusing spectrum of different services all under the same name and all before they're actually ready
Microsoft is so incredibly bad at marketing. And really not great at products too. People don't pick them because they're the best at what they do, but because they're what everyone else uses and they're acceptable. The whole reason for Teams being adopted so heavily is because it comes with office and it's not bad enough to justify paying for something better. But when having used other products that were actually leading in their class, it's sometimes sad being stuck with it.
In this light I do understand their rush to capture the AI market, being first is just how they work.
you're comment is old but what is the reliability problem? If it's the fact that you can't guarantee the same output for a given input then I agree. There are patterns out there where you prompt an llm with a list of functions, their description, and parameters and then ask it to chose one and the params. Then based on the response you call that function and return the results back to the llm to be used as part of the final response to the user's prompt.
If you can't guarantee the output of the llm how can you ever expect this to always work the same? How can you even test it? It may test out ok 99 times but on test #100 it fails. Any hallucination breaks it or, even worse, produces a confident sounding wrong output. Is that the reliability problem you're talking about?
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