Edit: Also, it's extremely narrow. On my 32" 4K display, 70% of the screen is empty. And the font is too think. And stuff keeps moving/jumping when I'm moving the mouse cursor.
I want 1998 back.
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one! I compulsively select random blocks of text: select up, select down, repeat. I definitely get annoyed with the popup-menu-on-select feature of Medium, but I feel I can hardly blame Medium for my random, compulsive habit.
I have the unshakable habit of triple-clicking a paragraph to highlight it to serve as a mark of where I was at when i need to interrupt reading.
(1) not even on the claim that that bookmark has that effect.
In the game you have to select units by dragging a box around them, and that habit has carried over to selecting text on the screen in pretty much every computer application.
I know that probably doesn't answer your question, but that would probably require a neuroscientist. It doesn't help me read personally, it just seems to be one of those repetitive tasks that slightly autistic people do.
Some of my coworkers share this habit as well, and they've never played RTS games, so it's acquired in different ways.
No, clicking four times doesn't select the whole page.
It has to do with border-spacing between table cells -- when you select text that runs into the border-spacing, it resets the selection to go from 1) original cell 2) start of the table 3) next cell.
With more sane styling (ie: setting border-spacing to 0), the selection won't jump to the start of the table.
This is just heaven here: http://imgur.com/asQy8v3
Look at all those lovely lines and right angles.
I suspect it's related to some patterns when reading books, like putting a bookmark below your current line and moving it down, or following your current position with your finger.
Totally agreed on your other points (particularly about animations on selection) but as the article mentions, eye tracking repeatedly shows people have trouble reading very wide text. Also many people use large monitors to have multiple windows, rather than a single window maximised.
Yes but to optimize for larger screens, the correct thing to do is to scale everything up (fonts, spacing, etc) in a responsive manner.
The amount of text content per line wouldn't change much, it would just fill up the screen better instead of using the same tiny font size you'd use for a 13inch screen @ 1080p on a 32" 4K display.
When lines get longer you either have to increase the leading, or font size, or shorten the lines to retain readability. Personally I hate having to detach every other tab from the browser just to change to width to something that's readable. In that sense I much prefer the content to have a maximum width beyond a certain viewport width because it's the only viable option to still have text that is readable.
(It's one of the things I loved about the design style of Windows 8 apps that has been lost in the Windows 8 hate, and admittedly was a part of the Windows 8 hate, because people don't respect a good horizontal scroll of columnar reading material, sigh.)
I've noticed also that I don't like to read text that starts on the left of the screen.
The solution that works for me is to install a sidebar (on Firefox, AiOS add-on) and if text is too wide or starts too much on the left, I enable and resize sidebar accordingly :)
That way your primary monitor can still be used to watch media and play games in the "standard" widescreen format, but your code and browser can readily be viewed on the sides.
IPS panels should work without a problem in both landscape and portrait mode.
Yes it's quite bad on that blog post, but if you check out an article [1] it doesn't suffer from that problem. Still has the selection-reader [2] problem, though.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/remoteapp/remoteapp-whatis
[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150528-00/?p=...
It goes to the right of the paragraph in that case instead of the last sentence of the paragraph.
Yes, this is a bug and something we will fix, thanks for calling this out :)
Looks like something to block regardless of whether it creates annoying menus. Is anyone else a little surprised (and perhaps repulsed) by Microsoft putting semi-shady 3rd-party scripts like this on their site? This seems completely opposite of what the Microsoft I knew would do.
I'd be happy with 2011, just before the Metro-inspired redesign of MSDN hit.
http://web.archive.org/web/20111228110049/http://msdn.micros...
http://web.archive.org/web/20130422112102/http://msdn.micros...
http://web.archive.org/web/20150102192514/http://msdn.micros...
I very much prefer the first design too.
I do the same thing when reading text and HATE websites that do this, the solution I've found is to just use uBlock Origin to block annoying web elements like this. You can do the same, just add the following filters:
docs.microsoft.com##body > .lf:nth-of-type(7) > .lf-active.lf-selection-popover.lf-popover > .lf-popover-content.lf-thread-content
docs.microsoft.com##body > .lf:nth-of-type(7) > .lf-active.lf-selection-popover.lf-popover > .lf-popover-arrow
Welcome to the last few years. I thought, when i bought a 24 inch monitor, I'd be using all of it; instead I'm minimizing Firefox so that sites don't look silly. I guess when you're using technology as badly designed as that used to create/display websites anything harder than justifying text and images becomes a nightmare to develop and support.
Why maximize a browser window on such a screen? Three or four windows side by side would take advantage of it.
Edit: looks like it's being served from fyre.co, which might be blocked by adblockers?
Could browsers not be smarter about this? If I'm on page A and I click a link X that redirects to B, when I click back I expect to go back to A, especially if X still redirects to B.