Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That's a little hard to believe, because the prompt makes it very obvious what's happening. If you attempt to open a link and it prompts you to pick a browser, the options are (using my own phone as an example:

Open With

(Samsung Internet) (Chrome) (Firefox) (Firefox Focus)

Just Once | Always

Android already really wants you to click "Always" and just have something set. But I click "Just Once" every time, because I want the freedom to use Firefox Focus for the random clickbait article that shows up in my news feed that I don't want polluting my Firefox history. By its nature, it is already an intentional decision on my part.

This being removed from Android 12 is Google saying, "Yeah, we really don't want you to have that choice anymore, because you might not pick the right choice for us."

You say that this prompt is "very obvious" but I strongly disagree.

> Open With

> (Samsung Internet) (Chrome) (Firefox) (Firefox Focus)

> Just Once | Always

I'm an android developer and have been for more than 10 years. I get messed up at this kind of prompt sometimes, and just the other day I thought to myself, 'surprised google hasn't improved that yet '

I'm sure 99%+ global android users find the experience confusing.

Agree to disagree, I guess?

What would you propose as an alternative? To my mind, this is a pretty like-for-like experience with other operating systems, e.g. when you click an unknown file extension in Windows and it prompts you to pick the program to open it with. You'll get a prompt that says "How do you want to open this file?", you'll get a prompt to pick the program, and then there's a tick box that says "Always use program to open .XYZ files" It's reasonably intuitive to me.

And again, if you click "Always", the prompt never comes back again. I've unintentionally clicked Always once or twice and then had to spend some time in the Android System menu resetting defaults.

The only other option for using the non-default browser after you have one associated is to long-click the URL and then manually locate the browser you want to use in the Share menu. That is cumbersome AF. The present menu offered when a non-default browser is specified is much better, IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com