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Comment by JorgeGT | Hacker News Reader

Tangential: it always annoys me how difficult it is to highlight text in a Google blog post and look it up. Drag doesn't work and right click clears the selection. My only working approach is highlight and hit menu key.

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I was about to say that it worked fine for me but then I realized that it might be because I have uMatrix, so I allowed the site everything it wanted in order to test and indeed that interferes with right click due to a dumb black popup thing with a twitter and two other icons on it.

Disappointed. Would have expected more in terms of UX from Google.

Anyway you might enjoy uMatrix, it's pretty good although it can be a tad bit annoying to figure out what I need to allow each domain in order for their pages to load content when they host content-critical scripts and such on a separate CDN-domain that they own or through a third-party CDN.

I also don't know if it's possible to allow some domain to always be allowed to be iFramed by any other. For example I would like to always allow embeds from SoundCloud, YouTube and Vimeo on any site.

I don't know why you'd expect better from UX, Google has had notoriously terrible UX for as long as I can remember. Off the top of my head - blogger/blogspot, youtube, hangouts android app, google voice android app, gmail settings, google maps (especially the android app), etc.

My favourite example of poor, almost outright user-hostile Google UX is adding a contact to the Android address book.

(For the uninitiated: there is no yep/confirm/save element in the add-contact dialog. You have to press the back arrow -- the biggest text on the screen is the heading Add new contact, but that doesn't react to touch!)

Looks like they fixed it, there's a save button for me.

http://i.imgur.com/S7Zfk0Sh.jpg

That reminds me - gmail hangouts vs inbox hangouts vs hangouts hangouts vs hangouts android - contact sharing is essentially useless. No way to search for a contact in your contact list from ANY of those except android. So if I want to text someone I haven't in a while, I need to first text them from my phone before having access to the conversation thread in web clients.

The whole reason why Google was a success is the superior UX of google.com over Yahoo, Altavista, et.al. They can ignore that at their peril.

The iconic simplicity of the Google web search UI was simply because the earliest developers were terrible at web programming.

It loaded fast over 56k, too.

I'd be interested to hear more about your reasoning, since it seems very flimsy and opinion-based. Developers at the time were excellent with the technologies available then.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/1384074

Its the other way around, its when the "web devs" came that its UX started to suffer.

They still are

I really like Google Maps Android's UI.

Google Search, YouTube and GMail are things that I find have good UX for me.

You are right, however, that they have had many products with not so good or even bad UX.

I just failed to remember the bad ones at the moment when I wrote my comment.

> I also don't know if it's possible to allow some domain to always be allowed to be iFramed by any other. For example I would like to always allow embeds from SoundCloud, YouTube and Vimeo on any site.

You can do this with uMatrix (and have added this functionality to my own browsers for the sites you used as an example) To do the same, add the following rules to your 'My Rules' tab:

For SoundCloud:

  * sndcdn.com other allow
  * sndcdn.com script allow
  * sndcdn.com xhr allow
  * soundcloud.com frame allow
  * soundcloud.com image allow
  * soundcloud.com other allow
  * soundcloud.com script allow
  * soundcloud.com xhr allow

For YouTube:

  * youtube-nocookie.com frame allow
  * youtube-nocookie.com script allow
  * youtube-nocookie.com xhr allow
  * youtube.com frame allow
  * youtube.com image allow
  * youtube.com other allow
  * youtube.com plugin allow
  * youtube.com script allow
  * youtube.com xhr allow
  * ytimg.com image allow
  * ytimg.com plugin allow
  * ytimg.com script allow

For Vimeo:

  * vimeo.com frame allow
  * vimeo.com other allow
  * vimeo.com script allow
  * vimeo.com xhr allow
  * vimeocdn.com frame allow
  * vimeocdn.com other allow
  * vimeocdn.com plugin allow
  * vimeocdn.com script allow
  * vimeocdn.com xhr allow

You can also do a global wildcard that allows all types such as

  * soundcloud.com * allow

but I prefer the more granular approach to allowing each element type.

Excellent, thanks :)

This can also be done through the GUI -- if you click on the domain at the top left of the uMatrix thingy then you can change it to * to implement a global rule. (Produces the same rules as given above.)

Thanks for this. I use uMatrix heavily and never noticed that functionality.

I found that in order for links to an offset into a video to work I also had to add:

  * googlevideo.com xhr allow
  * *.googlevideo.com xhr allow

Ah yep, I forgot about that one which is normally the stream source on a youtube video. This is the additional global rule I use:

  * googlevideo.com * allow

And then some fronted developers wonder how/why anyone would browse the Web with JavaScript blocked. This is why. (Plus malware. Plus privacy. Plus performance issues.) Thankfully the blog renders without JS.

Trust me: we know

Not enough of you know

Not all of us care. If you want me to take an application that does complex, possibly computationally expensive client-side work and extend it so that it also supports doing the same work server-side because you refuse to run the application code locally, I'm happy to do so at my regular hourly rate plus the amortized cost of whatever additional infrastructure is required. If you want all that extra work and ongoing cost for free, you're welcome to go on wanting.

On the other hand, I wouldn't build a blog with this kind of highlight popup nonsense in the first place, because it's stupid and annoying; I'd do it in the end if a client insisted, but I'd also try hard to build a case around user engagement (or lack of same) that the time and cost of doing it would be wasted. So we may not be talking to the same point here.

Knowing isn't even half the battle.

When you paycheck depends on people that don't care about it at all and keep adding stuff that is counter to that goal... then good luck

Firefox 50.0.2 (just noticed there's an update) on Windows 10.

    Drag to select, ctrl+c, ctrl+k, ctrl+v, enter.
    Drag to select, ctrl+c, ctrl+t, ctrl+v, enter.
    Drag to select, ctrl+c, ctrl+l, ctrl+v, enter.

working for me.

Also, right click on any term and hit "Search for <term> using <engine of choice>".

On macOS, you can three-finger-tap (not click, tap) to invoke the right-click “Look Up” menu item. That’s my preferred technique, though it’s obviously OS-dependant.

I remember that I had a Synaptics driver on my old XPS laptop that allowed to customize three-fingers actions, so probably should be doable in other environments!

Click-drag to highlight, and then Alt-click to "Search Google" works for me on Chromebook.

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