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Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

Chrome / Chromium have a habit of making these arbitrary changes that seriously annoy some (arguably small) percentage of their users, while claiming that it makes it simpler / better for everyone else, while explaining impatiently why it's infeasible to make the now missing feature a configuration option.

Evidently the kinds of people that can't be bothered going into the Advanced Configuration Settings page would be confused by an additional item in the Advanced Configuration Settings page.

I never used the backspace button for back (though it's probably what's mapped to my mouse button #8 - I'll know on the next upgrade), but I did get mightily annoyed by two changes a while back, and am always happy to bring them up whenever there's a story about Chrom* devs doing this kind of thing.

1. snap-to-mouse - while dragging the scrollbar, if you move the mouse further than ~80 pixels away from the scrollbar column, the page jumps back to the original location - apparently MS Windows users love this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this, and

2. clicking inside the URL bar selects the whole contents - apparently MS Windows users are used to this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this.

No idea what the defaults are for OSX, and, really, it doesn't matter - these features should be sensitive to extant defaults on whatever desktop environment the browser finds itself running on.

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The problem with configuration options is that they need maintaining indefinitely to accommodate a small proportion of the user population. That means testing behaviour with the flag on/off, and taking into account the possibility of that flag being on when dealing with bug reports.

In this case it's a minor thing which probably wouldn't require much maintainance, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

In most cases that makes complete sense... but this behavior has been around so long. Adding a configuration option means they can track data on if this feature is being used and worth continuing to support.

That said, I'm glad they finally did something to fix this bad UX design.

>Adding a configuration option means they can track data on if this feature is being used and worth continuing to support

leaving it enabled also allows them to do this, which they have done for the last couple years and clearly their data says that it's not worth supporting, because now they're dropping it.

This. Configuration flags increase complexity. Every time you change the feature in question (or add something that uses it) you will have to take into account every possible flag combination.

That's not true. It's like whenever you change a line of code you need to take into account every other line of code in the project.

If option for backspace behaviour suddenly starts interfering with some unrelated feature, it means somebody seriously fucked up the architecture of the project. Nothing else. Configuration flags aren't scary, and should not be used as a rationalization for dumbing down software.

This is true in general. Although "decrease complexity" shouldn't exactly trump "build the right thing."

In this case, the right thing really is contextual, so a configuration or extant setting / default is worth the cost in complexity.

The quote "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" comes to mind here.

Agreed. Especially in a case like this where it's actually pretty trivial to write an extension for this behavior. This change decreases the maintenance of chromium, removes a non-obvious data-destroying keyboard shortcut, and still gives users the option of bringing the feature back if they want it.

> The problem with configuration options is that they need maintaining indefinitely

This is a shortcut button … The maintenance argument is really a straw-man in this case …

> but you have to draw the line somewhere.

And this shows that they chose to place this line at «this product is our product, there is no customization options»

It's inconceivable that this should require any maintenance. I don't need a "backspace key goes back" checkbox, I just need to be able to customize the keyboard bindings. Decoupling the actions a program can perform from the key combinations which trigger those actions is basic stuff.

From the maintainer's point-of-view, having the option to bind "backspace" to "window.history.back" shouldn't require any more maintenance than having the option to bind "alt-left" to "window.history.back" does.

It is Google's fault that they didn't make Chrome work this way. It also means I can't unbind "ctrl-shift-q" from "quit_immediately_without_asking", because Google refuse to add an option to make it so that I can't accidentally fat-finger a C-w into something that ends my entire session. All keyboard shortcut problems disappear instantly if key bindings are configurable, however, without adding new options for each command.

Reminds me of the "flaw of averages" article [1] that was posted here a few month back. This seems like a general attitude in Google products features development, they try to find the simplest set of features that will please the most users, but that set probably doesn't exist, each user needs their own tweaks, and in the end their product becomes less useful for everyone.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

I've come to suspect that the flaw of averages dynamic is indeed deeply instantiated at Google.

That page is not readable in Germany: ERROR. The request could not be satisfied. The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country.

Any idea what could block it? Never seen this before...

> The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country.

Many CDNs can be configured to block access within a country. For whatever reason, that's what The Star has chosen here.

The page seems to have been blocked from my country too (France) since I posted that link. Google's cache works : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KsgLFDL...

great read, thanks :D

now if only our cars are as adjustable, given the almost-similar circumstances

I'm primarily on Windows and that first feature annoys the heck out of me. I would rather scrolling stop or continue, but the snap-back when the mouse leaves a zone is irritating.

I think the second is more of an optimization because when you click on the address bar you're most likely either copying or overwriting the URL. It's much less common to modify it.

If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should check out Windows File Explorer from Vista/7 onward. Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.

The second is really annoying on Linux because selecting something in X clears the previous selection.

Nope, they actually thought about that. When you click on the url box the selection isn't replaced. So you can totally select an URL elsewhere, click on URL bar, press backspace to clear the bar, and middle-click-paste the selection.

On the other hand selecting the text in the URL bar in any other way (with mouse drag, triple click, or keyboard) will update the selection.

This does mean that copying the whole URL is a pain - click to highlight the whole thing, then click a bunch more times until the whole thing is highlighted again.

(Unless I'm mistaken, the right-click copy uses a different clipboard, so you can't use that.)

Yeah I can see how that would be annoying. I'm so rarely in X that I don't always appreciate some of the features it offers. Scrolling the window under the cursor though is one I always hope will find it's way into Windows.

Windows 10 actually has that on by default now, called "Scroll Inactive Windows."

> If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should check out Windows File Explorer from Vista/7 onward. Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.

Actually, I’m one of the people who like that so much, I enabled it even in KDE Dolphin.

EDIT: Due to submission restrictions, I can’t answer right now – I’ll have to wait about an hour before I can answer comments, sorry.

How do you use it? I understand how it works but I see no advantage to it over the tree view. I always enable the "expand to location" option so that my tree view is exactly where I am.

To me that address bar abomination is just an obfuscation of otherwise useful information with large clickable regions of functionality I don't want.

I think you are in the minority here. For most people, navigating from one folder to another is not "functionality I don't want" in a desktop folder browser, but is the main thing you want to do. I'd much rather have UI that lets me navigate efficiently than that makes it efficient to copy-and-paste arbitrary substrings within a folder path. I do the former almost every time I use the file browser and the latter basically never.

My main computer is a Mac and I very much wish its "Finder" had navigation tools as nice as the "breadcrumb bar" you are describing in Windows.

>My main computer is a Mac and I very much wish its "Finder" had navigation tools as nice as the "breadcrumb bar" you are describing in Windows.

It's not completely the same as on Windows, but:

- Shift-Apple-G lets you enter a directory path to open (including bash-like completion with tab).

- Option-Apple-P shows/hides the "path bar" at the lower edge of a window where the hierarchy of the current folder is displayed (including a spartan context menu).

On Windows I mainly use the explorer address bar to go to those hidden folders like ProgramData.

On OS X, I think you can just right-click the window name and select the parent folder you want to go up to.

I think there is also a "show breadcrumbs" option in the preferences for Finder, which may or may not give more of the functionality you want.

Thanks for the right-click on title tip... doesn't seem to have a show breadcrumbs option that I can find... still in yosimite on my work laptop though.

The menu option actually calls it "Path Bar", not "Breadcrumb Bar".

> How do you use it? I understand how it works but I see no advantage to it over the tree view. I always enable the "expand to location" option so that my tree view is exactly where I am.

Well, the tree view in dolphin is small, and mostly hidden by the bookmark menu.

So I have to resort to using the breadcrumbs as a poor (wo-)mans tree view.

I have to use Windows 7 periodically, and it annoys the heck out of me too, given the feature applies to every application on that platform.

It's the fact it's inconsistent on my platform (KDE on Debian GNU/Linux) exacerbates the annoyance. I should not have to consider which application I'm in, in order to preempt the way the scrollbar / mouse will work.

With the second - I appreciate that for many people, for much of the time, you're wanting to type something else into the address bar. However, on MS Windows you have to type ctrl-c / ctrl-v to copy / paste. On real operating systems <tm> you just have to select the region -- so having a whole line selected for you when you click near it is unwanted.

But ultimately it's the inconsistency. I need to consider if I'm clicking in the address bar, or another text box, in order to predict what's about to be selected.

And, yes, the Win7 explorer bar has moved me to tears also. I can highly recommend the breadcrumbkiller [1] - even if you don't install it, the rant on that guy's page is well worth reading.

[1] http://twigstechtips.blogspot.com.au/2010/02/win7-remove-win...

The file explorer address bar was one of the best features that were introduced in Vista IMO.

If you're in folder "C:\foo\bar\baz\boz\" and want to go to "C:\foo\" it's just one mouse click. Or if you want to go to "C:\foo\bor" that's just two mouse clicks. Much faster than clicking "back" or "up" multiple times.

To add to this, I believe in Windows 10 (possibly 8?) you can actually move files to a grandparent folder by dragging it to the associated button in the breadcrumb bar.

Going from memory since I couldn't reproduce this behavior in 7. Could also be wrong about 10; someone else should try it and confirm.

I just tested in Windows 10, and you're right, you can drag files to any of the parent directories in the address bar.

Sweet.

Yeah, I remember doing it once and thinking it was extremely helpful at the time, but I only remember doing it once so far.

Got used to do this in Gnome, got frustrated when I found "breadcrumbs" in win7 can't do the same...

Well, to be fair if you have the much older tree view enabled on the left side of the explorer, it's only one click to go to C:\foo\bor.

I agree with parent, the adress bar should be the adress bar. Also better for sans-mouse-use. Just F6 and end, ctrl+shift+left arrow until you get to before "bar" and then backspace, enter.

Sure, it's more input but it's still way faster than reaching for your mouse.

(old guy here) I'll never understand why the left-pane tree view isn't the default. Not having it follow the current directory makes it a waste of screen real estate.

>if you have the much older tree view enabled on the left side of the explorer, it's only one click to go to C:\foo\bor

No, it's unpredictable amount of clicks, drags and scrolls to unpredictable places, if C:\foo\bor is not immediately visible in the tree view. And worse, if there is "bor" in every one of 100 "foos" you have on C:.

>If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should check out Windows File Explorer from Vista/7 onward. Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.

You can also right click the bar to edit or copy the URI...

With multiple monitors scroll bars are broken anyway.

I use drag to scroll assigned to my right mouse button (works great in FF, so so in Chrome):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grab-and-drag...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scrollbar-anywhere...

I miss this so much outside my browser...

There are programs like DisplayFusion which take care of scrolling in non-focused windows. I highly recommend it, although it is paid after a while. There must be other tools out there that can do it!

jup, i used http://www.premeforwindows.com/ for a while. But i mean the drag anywhere to scroll.

> I would rather scrolling stop or continue, but the snap-back when the mouse leaves a zone is irritating.

I liked it (back when it existed on Mac OS X): By moving the mouse horizontally to the vertical scroll bar I could instantly return to where I started scrolling. Use case: Read something (web page, source code...), scroll around to look for related information, then return back to the exact position I was before.

> Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI.

And you also have the confusing "copy address" / "copy address as text" context menu.

I use the first feature constantly. If I'm reading reddit comments at the bottom of the page, I can scroll to the top and a part of the original post and then snap back to where I was. I think Chrome actually removed this for a day or two and it really annoyed me.

I believe the name of the feature is called "breadcrumbs" and i also dont like it very much, as one poster stated it is nice to go up several levels without making many clicks but i prefer to see the entire URI and be able to modify it as oppose to breadcrumb "directory buttons"

If you click to the right of everything, then it turns into a textbox and you can modify it at will.

Which doesn't help in the most common case (for me): editing down a URL that's way too long on sites that love to jam absolutely everything they can think of into a query string, extending the URL many screen widths out to the right.

CTRL+L is generally your friend.

Pressing CTRL+L selects the entire location bar. This is not what I want.

The backspace thing has gotten attention more than ever on sites like Reddit. I have routinely seen posts complaining about it and the spacebar key doing behaviors that users never ever intended. For example, pressing space and then accidentally scrolling down which wasn't their intention at all, but is the behavior of space.

I think some of those complaints reaching the front page of reddit may have helped spur this into action by the Chrome team.

The tyranny of the vocal minority.

It's a race to the bottom.

So an opinion with enough upvotes to get to the front page of a site where power users lurk is "the tyranny of the vocal minority"?

Yep, their power-user-ness or the fact that they frequent a particular enthusiast forum does not make them any less of a minority when the software we're talking about is used by many millions of people (the silent majority).

Do you think it actually makes sense to keep the backspace as "page-back"? It's literally lost me dozens of form entries over the years (some of which were very hard to restore).

Thankfully on OSX/Safari, this legacy behavior/cruft is not present.

Seems like change for change sake, like so many of Google changes. Unilaterally changing 20 year behaviour that effects less than half one percent of users isn't an improvement it's rearranging chairs on the titanic.

Also, Lazarus is an old plugin for Firefox that saves forms between sessions/refreshes. Too bad goog want to capture new users at any expense. If it doesn't work because the latest hotness is js forms that's a problem with webdevs.

Do you really feel like the majority of PC users want backspace to navigate in a web browser? I seriously doubt the majority have ever intentionally used that shortcut. It wouldn't even surprise me if it were more often used unintentionally than intentionally.

Most users don't want shit. They take what is given to them and learn to use it. Which means every feature you remove from your software is one less thing your users can do now. Good if you're lazy, but the point of software should be to empower people to do more.

I'm gonna be majorly pissed if they disable space bar scroll. I use that quite literally constantly while I'm browsing. It is the scrolling method I use 99% of the time.

Backspace to go back, OTOH, I was aware of, but I doubt I ever wanted. Alt-Left is easier to use because it's less modal. Still bothers me in general when devs screw with established defaults.

I think the backspace thing matters more than spacebar, because spacebar isn't going to cause you to lose (potentially hours of) work.

I do find the spacebar behavior isn't super predictable when I am trying to pause things, such as youtube .

The most confusing thing is that Youtube and Netflix seem to occasionally toggle pause when you press space; other times Youtube scrolls, and Netflix does nothing (there'd be nowhere to scroll).

I've never managed to consistently replicate it by having had the player in/out of focus already, not/scrolled, etc. odd.

It's YouTube specific, but "k" is more reliable for me as a pause/unpause button on YouTube.

Chrome is lately behaving even more unpredictably when scrolling with the spacebar, because now if you click on either the back or forward buttons it puts a focus rectangle on them and now pressing space will go back/forward again instead of scrolling down like I wanted.

Aside from it just being what you're used to, what's wrong with just having PgUp/PgDn for scrolling?

Right hand on mouse, left hand on WASD. The spacebar is always easy to hit your thumb, but you have to move your right hand away the mouse to hit Page Down. Plus it mixes well with Vimperator-like extensions, to the point that I can do 90% of my browsing with one hand.

EDIT: and before anyone points out that if I'm already using extensions I could easily add another, yes and I would if I had to, but it's not ideal, because 1. Extensions crash, fail to load, or aren't allowed by internal browser pages, and 2. You sometimes have to use other peoples' machines and it's annoying when basic functionality is locked away.

All keyboards have a spacebar. Not all keyboards today have dedicated page up/page down keys. So potentially more keystrokes due to the function layer.

Reddit might have had an impact, but they have been gathering data to support fixing this for years: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=200049...

Spacebar scroll is standard on many Unix utilities, starting with pagers such as less and more. Given that paging down a screen of text is very likely to be one of the most common things you'll do, and that it's a well-established motif, as well as the fact it doesn't destroy user-state (as back-nav on backspace does), it's quite defensible.

I've never actually seen someone complain about it until now.

People complain about it all the time on anything having to do with video playing, because when the video player has focus space is used to play/pause the video, but when the player is not focused, it scrolls down the page.

Frankly, I would be perfectly happy if space to page went away entirely. I exclusively use two finger dragging on laptops and scroll wheels on desktops to browse websites. I never use space to move down a whole page at a time, and that's a jarring action anyway because it inevitably causes me to lose the context of where I was reading in the document in a way that smooth scrolling accomplished through other means does not.

Most of my desktop use is on a Thinkpad laptop with no mouse and the trackpad disabled.

I don't have a scroll wheel or a touch screen.

The gaming instance is a failure of Web controls to adequately adapt to context. I can see how that would be distracting. I am not willing to sacrifice my space-to-scroll capabilities on that account.

As with Fitts' law, the spacebar is a very large target. Easy to hit. Frequent action. Well-placed use.

You do raise one other point: scrolling tends to make re-aquiring reading point difficult. That's a fair gripe and one that annoys me.

I'm particularly sensitive to it in DuckDuckGo, which smooth-scrolls a pre-set amount in the SERP when scrolling (I forget if by up/down, pgup/pgdwn, space, or other). I absolutely cannot figure out where I was and where I want to be, and have reported this multiple times.

For long-form text, I've taken a strong preferene, in portrait display devices (my tablet when reading) to fully paginated text, and a page flip mode. Much as PDF is an abysmal format in many ways, I find the capability to retain a spatial memory of where content is on a book or in a page is useful, and generally prefer this to smooth-scrolling.

Pocket, which offers a page-flip mode, makes it both brittle and of limited utility. Any up-down motion whilst flipping a page "breaks" page-flip mode and returns to scroll.

Page-flip doesn't clearly indicate location within the work as a whole (Pocket also mutes the scrollbar indicator generally).

And lastly, the pages aren't consistently presented -- effectivly Pocket repaginates a document whenever and wherever you enter into Page Flip mode. I'd prefer it had a sense of what the pagination breaks were for a given viewport size and font selection, and stuck to that.

Or I could read a book....

> Most of my desktop use is on a Thinkpad laptop with no mouse and the trackpad disabled.

> I don't have a scroll wheel or a touch screen.

I use the middle button + trackpoint for scrolling - works great. That's the default on most Linux distros/desktop environments, might require some configuration on Windows.

Spacebar is a far larger target.

Fitts' Law.

I don't think that's particularly applicable here. I doubt that any touch typist has problems finding the vast majority of the keys on their keyboard (or mouse). Also, how often do you hit space while reading an article anyway, a couple of times per minutes? It's nowhere near being time-sensitive. Even if it somehow took you ten seconds to find it each time before you hit it, your finger would have found it and be settled on it by the time you reached the bottom of the page and were ready to go onto the next.

But the middle track point button is just the right distance. When I relax my hand muscles and place it on the keyboard so that the tip of the index finger is on the track point, the thumb is on the track point buttons. Perfect distance. Using the space bar would be uncomfortable.

I use space-to-scroll very frequently when reading long passages of text. I consider it a valuable shortcut.

I don't find it jarring at all to read that way, because I know where to resume reading after hitting space. There is one exception: a lot of websites with absolutely-positioned headers scroll incorrectly when you hit space, such that the point you would resume reading at ends up behind the header, and you have to scroll up a bit to reveal it.

A few websites with headers get it right, and your resume point is below the header after hitting space. This makes me much less sympathetic to the websites that screw it up.

That header issue is especially jarring to me too, and it's one of the reasons I don't use space to page, because it doesn't work consistently everywhere. Two-finger dragging always works, as does scroll wheel.

I do use paginated reading on my Kindle, which always gets it right. It doesn't quite work properly on the web often enough though.

wow, I didn't even know you could scroll using spacebar. Neat!

> No idea what the defaults are for OSX, and, really, it doesn't matter - these features should be sensitive to extant defaults on whatever desktop environment the browser finds itself running on.

I think there's an argument to be made in either direction.

I use Chrome (and other apps like Sublime) on three different platforms and would much prefer to have commonality on the application level. Since it's a big part of my workflow, having it work differently from OS to OS would definitely slow me down.

It really should be an option. Like how Sublime lets you pick between DOS and Unix style line breaks. Because that's how you handle cross platform discrepancies.

I've been pondering your point for a while.

The problem, I think, comes down to this -- more people use lots of different applications on one platform, than the same application on multiple platforms.

If you're going to use one application only, on multiple platforms, then I could see how a consistency in the way that application behaved would be useful. But I can't see how anyone's workflow wouldn't involve interacting with some number of other applications on each of those platforms.

At that point you could assert all applications on all platforms behave consistently. This is not likely to be a well-received suggestion. Or you could try to make all applications on a particular platform behave consistently. The latter seems to align with people's UI expectations, and, for the most part, is what we have out there now. The pain point is where expected behaviour from one platform bleeds into applications running on different platform where that behaviour might best be described as 'surprising'.

> clicking inside the URL bar selects the whole contents

This is one of the annoyances on Windows. On Linux/OSX you can click and drag on the URL to select a portion of the string, but on Windows it auto-highlights the full string completely, forcing one to reclick again (slowly!) to highlight a portion.

Also: right-clicking on a link in Linux/OSX auto-highlights the full link text so you can `Copy` or `Search on Google` the highlighted text. In Windows you must manually highlight the link, then right-click on it.

Small things add up to big annoyances.

> On Linux/OSX you can click and drag on the URL to select a portion of the string

Works fine on Windows. Just don't click into the address bar before dragging and everything works as you'd expect. With clicking first you have a selection, though, and dragging that will do drag & drop of text instead.

I'm running Chrome in Win10 and it does the exact behavior you describe only Linux/OSX doing.

Speaking of annoying things Google has done lately, they recently updated Android's Google Keyboard completely changing the layout, keysize and removing most of the secondary (press and hold for more characters) keys. It has become almost impossible to type with it but I haven't found another keyboard with a good theme, haptic feedback and good suggestions. I miss the days Google used to cater to power users.

The long press is still there, it's just disabled by default. You can change it in the settings. You can also change the layout in settings, although I don't know specifically what changed there that you dislike.

Advanced search settings have been missing from the Google App for some time. To search only the past year, you have to use their mobile website.

If you press and hold on the comma key and go into languages, enabling languages such as French or Spanish will bring back the ability to press and hold for diacritical marks. As for your complaint about key size, I wouldn't know because I use swipe typing exclusively and have found the update a significant improvement. I also really appreciate the new gestures for deleting multiple words by swiping left on backspace and for moving the cursor by swiping on the space-bar.

You don't even need to do that much, if you just enable the "Long press for symbols" option in the preferences you get back the all of the previous behavior of long-pressing letters.

> the ability to press and hold for diacritical marks

Wait, they removed that (I didn’t do the update yet, refused to connect to WiFi to avoid it).

I quite literally use that every minute – typing on UK layout German and British, and trained the dictionary to accept any mix of the two languages.

No, they didn't. They just buried it behind a setting.

You can go into 'Apps' from the main settings menu and rollback the update. That's what I did because I agree the new layout is horrible.

It's not free to add a configuration of this class to the advanced configurations; items in that list must be tested, maintained in future versions, etc.

The kind of people who are willing to go to the Advanced Configuration Settings page are also willing to tweak their keyboard mappings to map any modifier key they want to to the "go back in history" accelerator for Chrome.

Maintaining software quality is hard. Each additional toggle doubles the size of your test matrix.

I totally appreciate this. I really do.

My defence here is that the test matrix for the way it worked already existed.

And the change would have included some unit tests.

Further, neither the way it worked, or was changed to work, is an especially complex mechanism.

Developer explanations in the bug reports for both were not 'this is going to be hard to maintain', but instead were 'having this configurable will confuse users'.

It wouldn't surprise me if the defaults on OS X are the same. #2 in particular, I consider that to be sensible autofocus behavior. If you don't want to replace the URL but instead modify it, just hit an arrow key. Partly this is because there are shortcuts to select the address bar to begin with, so I rarely use a mouse. It's generally consistent on mobile platforms too, to select the entire URL. You have to hold your finger a second time to position the cursor because the most common interaction with the URL bar usually means jumping somewhere entirely different.

Edit: they could maintain a flag to change these behaviours though, if they were a concern. You could also build your own copy of the browser, patched as you wish... ;-)

>It wouldn't surprise me if the defaults on OS X are the same. #2 in particular

It used to be different, but that behavior unfortunately has made it to default in OS X now. It annoys me to no small extend, since I very frequently want to edit URL's to remove session ID's or reference tokens. Of course, the average user is to daft to double-click...

Just click and drag to select.

Add mandatory auto-fill in the omnibar to the list of grievances.

If you do a search for "JavaScript" and then later perform a search for Java by typing "Java[Enter]", it will do a search for "JavaScript" instead, possibly before you have time to react. To prevent this, you have to stop before pressing [Enter] for each search to make sure it doesn't auto-fill, then press backspace if it did.

This feature cannot be turned off, and the faster you are at typing, the more aggravating it is.

In Chrome, obscure configuration options are called "extensions". Instead of searching for them in "advanced settings", you search for them in the extension gallery. The great thing about extensions is that anyone can write them, so you aren't limited by whatever the Chrome team decides to provide.

>while explaining impatiently why it's infeasible to make the now missing feature a configuration option.

There's been a general trend in computing for a while now to not have any kind of configurability. You can see it in most of the major UIs now. And from what I've read on tech discussion forums, techies themselves absolutely hate configurability: they complain that they don't want to have to slog through a bunch of configuration options for everything, they want things to be set up to their preference out-of-the-box.

When you have a product, you have 2 solutions:

- Make changes that annoy some users

- For fear of annoying anyone, keep adding without ever removing, increase the number of settings, in other words bloat. Until a new, "lighter" alternative products comes and everyone moves out from your bloated product

So yes, by removing features that they realized weren't good one, they're keeping the product simple.

At one point I forked Chromium over the click-selects-all in the URL bar. In OS X, this was the only application that behaved that way (until Apple recently followed suit with Safari...). Now I just use FireFox because they give me the option to override the default. I edit URLs far more often than typing in new ones. If I am going to a new URL, I generally type command-l or open a new tab...

The point of highlighting the URL with a single click isn't just to replace it with something else, but to copy it fast, and all kinds of users, including true power users, copy URLs much more often than edit them.

I'm sure that's the rationale, but 'true power users' likely hit meta-l to select the whole url anyhow, instead of using the mouse...

2. is a lot like Outlook (at least on Mac), oh you highlighted something, I'll just go a head and assume that that's the only part of the original email you'll want quotes in the reply... WHY?

If I wanted the entire URL highlighted I could just double click on it like in every single other piece of software.

It's infuriating trying to highlight anything in Outlook. Oh, you're dragging to select part of a word, or a huge long URI? Let me go ahead and automatically expand your selection to cover the entire token, with the trailing whitespace. Haha, you're trying to circumvent my helpfulness by setting the cursor and shift-right-arrowing? Haha, no soup for you! Break down and copy it into notepad instead!

> with the trailing whitespace.

Worst feature EVER. I can't begin count how many times I've had the following talk with users:

user: My password doesn't work

me: Did you copy it from Outlook?

Disable 'smart paragraph selection' and 'automatically select entire word' in the edit options. I turn these off instantly in Word every time I have to reinstall them.

Problem solved.

He is helping people on the phone, he might never speak to the same person twice. Settings really aren't a solution for bad UX.

If you're emailing users' passwords you've got bigger problems than a bit of trailing white space.

Lots of systems email users an initial password which must be changed at first login. It's not the world's most elegant solution, but it's also not terrible and basically does an implicit email verification. I'm not sure that it's any worse than sending a URL with an embedded token that takes the user to a password-change page.

>but it's also not terrible

It's terrible. Really.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7943365

Like everything in IT security, it's about your use case, threat matrix, and risk assessment.

iOS is also staggeringly bad at this. Often you highlight part of a webpage and it decides you wanted from the top to that point, which is stupid. Like one paragraph in a reddit comment or wikipedia -> the whole page, menu and all.

I was going to see if it happened here but I can't highlight any of your comment while typing mine.. I can only highlight inside this text box. Good job I don't want to quote anything.

I've never heard of #1 and nor do I see it in any other app (Win 10) and for #2 I think that is how it is done on osx as well. I believe that a majority of google works off of macs so its likely that most of the chrome devs are on macs.

Re #2: my brother once released a fork of chromium where the only change was fixing the stupid "select the whole url bar on single click". People feel really strongly about certain features.

Yeah #2 selects the whole content visually, but it doesn't put the contents into the primary buffer, very annoying.

This was done deliberately after lots of user uproar - it used to auto select the contents of the URL bar AND set the primary selection. This meant that anytime you did anything with the URL bar, it would wipe your primary selection, which was pretty annoying.

What Linux users wanted was for it to behave normally - i.e. not auto select, but set primary selection if you selected something in the URL. The auto select was apparently non-negotiable, so we ended up with the current compromise.

It does set the primary selection if you manually select some/all of the URL though.

>it's infeasible to make the now missing feature a configuration option.

Isn't Chromium opensource? I'm sure they'll accept your pull request.

obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1172/

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