Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

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Every user thinks they're the aggregate "users", though. That their personal opinion and take is universal.

For instance the address bar on here is a canonical truth and is the linchpin of the experience. See how every time a browser touches it (e.g. Chrome truncating the address) is met with mobs of the angry. Many users -- including even "power" users -- seldom interact with the address bar. Nor is it verification of anything much. It simply isn't that important anymore.

Another comment mentions that the reload button is two clicks away, which is a fair point but that everyone who actually uses reload (generally developers -- zero web apps should ever require the user to hit reload) use a keyboard shortcut.

Eh.

"Certain UI changes in macOS, Windows, etc. are so obviously bad (and are eventually changed)"

True. At the same time, every UI change of anything ever has yielded a firestorm of criticism and pushback. And more times than not the new design was better and people acclimate to it and eventually prefer it. I judge nothing on initial reception.

> Many users -- including even "power" users -- seldom interact with the address bar. Nor is it verification of anything much. It simply isn't that important anymore.

I interact with the address bar every time I go to page or site. It is my single most interfaces with the browser after the sites themselves.

And that it isn’t much use for verification is exactly the reason why people advocate that it should display all information!

> Every user thinks they're the aggregate "users", though. That their personal opinion and take is universal.

Because it is. Ultimately, your comfort is the only thing that matters when you're using a computer (particularly Macs). If something doesn't operate in the way that you want it to, why is that not a valid argument for replacing it?

It's not a valid argument that everyone should bend to your whim, it's possible a valid argument that (a) there should be a load of config options and/or (b) you should be able to edit the source code to make it work how you want.

One of the clearest examples of this for me is having the address bar at the bottom on mobile devices. There is pretty much no disadvantage to placing it there yet whenever a browser does that, people get inevitably angry. I hope Apple sticks with it and the other iOS browsers like Brave adopt it.

Edit: point proven

Was this an optional setting? Was it suddenly turned on with the option to turn it off buried in a settings menu than normal users are scared of?

I actually didn't know iOS had this, I only know about FireFox on Android and it asked me if I wanted to opt in before thrusting it upon me. That's a good way to make major UI changes.

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