Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

Things like the tab bar and the reload button are not mere "widgets"; they are the core UI elements. They are the single most important part of the app. This is simply a bad call.

I'm all for saving vertical space whenever possible. But this is a bad call.

View on HN

The single most important part of the app is the content.

I would be interested to see a version where the tabs and url bar roll up to one line if you have the space (few tabs, large monitor), but wrap to two if you don't (lots of tabs, small monitor).

I’ve been using a vertical tab bar on the left in Firefox for a while, offers many tabs and lots of vertical space

To a certain extent. If you show too much content at the expense of navigation you simply make your app harder to use. There’s a sweet spot in the UX bell curve and I feel like the new Safari missed the mark. Although, the iOS version looks like an upgrade for one handed use.

Can’t remember the Mac OS X Release when Apple removed the dedicated reload button from Safari. Was it 10.6?

I'm on Big Sur and have it on my Safari?

It was a separate button on the toolbar, not right next to the address bar (which if you misclick you end up editing the URL instead of reloading).

And it was Safari 4, released in 2008!

Command R. I use a browser that has a refresh button and I don’t bother using it ever.

This is my habit as well. Rarely click refresh button.

I CMD+R every time and I guess for the amount of time people reload it’s not costly to learn it …

I use ⌘+R and actually just press R with vimari but if i'm just casually scrolling the web with my mouse sometimes I just want to press the reload button which is now two clicks.

In usability heuristics, that's called an accelerator. We would normally call it a shortcut. Whatever you call it, the point is it's an alternative to doing it in a more accessible way, not THE way.

I understand that, maybe they’ve done studies on how often people reload a page and made a decision based on numbers. After 20 years of browsing the web, at least for me, THE way became the shortcut and I never click on that (now useless) button. I can understand why they pushed it a click away, maybe numbers/studies back this up, maybe not. Personally I like having some buttons on the toolbar but I think I prefer the cleaner UI even more and I don’t mind doing 1 click to find them back. Anyway when we play games we never count clicks right? It’s not like it really cost us anything … but that’s just me.

> After 20 years of browsing the web, at least for me, THE way became the shortcut and I never click on that

Again, that’s an accelerator. That’s for advanced use. So you’re an advanced user, good on you. Things are not designed just for advanced users.

> I can understand why they pushed it a click away, maybe numbers/studies back this up

No studies would back up making an interface less discoverable, thus less intuitive for new users, and also increasing cognitive load by requiring users to remember where something is rather than it just being there. ‘…’ and hamburger menus have always been poor substitutes for well-designed navigation hierarchies.

Someone actually ran the new tabs against Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics, respected in the industry for 27 years: https://twitter.com/feetsnz/status/1403849426683138053

The results were not good.

There are no numbers on the planet that could justify lowering usability. Apple themselves gave a WWDC session on how minimalism != usability. Of course, they can have a minimalist interface; that should never come at the expense of usability. They don’t eat their own dog food.

> Anyway when we play games we never count clicks right?

What do games have to do with a web browser?

You are right

If I CMD+R on Hacker News, it reloads the page. If I do it on outlook.office.com, it starts drafting a reply to the email I have selected. Reload button does the same thing everywhere.

This is one thing I'm grateful for as a Firefox user, I can disallow websites from overriding built-in shortcuts both globally or on a site-by-site basis. I don't believe Safari offers this unfortunately.

Yes, I wish webapps didn't put unnecessary keyboard shortcuts (or disable them by default)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com