Please, for the love of god, let open up anything on your site in a new tab.
I also think in the modern world that as long as your assets are all properly versioned with good cache control headers using actually web requests for navigation instead of a self-contained SPA makes a lot less sense. Once upon a time an SPA was a solution to shifty internet, limited bandwidth and rich web experiences - those arguments have become a lot less valid in the modern world.
(this is a topic extremely near and dear to my heart as a (eh-sorta) full stack developer that needs to suffer through many poorly built applications as a user)
So I reverted my changes and worked on features instead of stack
I was just responding to it being a criticism of 'designers', maybe I misread that, but my initial reaction was as above, that it's not completely trivial to allow, or like it necessarily comes for free and has been 'turned off' by design.
One thing that I noticed is that more than half the time "open in new tab" is broken, I can click the link, copy the URL, open a new tab, paste the url and get what I wanted. It's so maddening.
This is of course maddening if the site should not be a SPA but was developed that way because when you are running a company and need to build things quickly it is easier if you just have one toolbox labelled SPA-building tools and pull that out and get going.
I'd argue that each individual view in your app should have a routable URL, otherwise sharing links to anything is basically impossible, as is bookmarking certain pages, or even reloading them.
> With SPAs, that's often not true for entire 'pages', never mind modals and views you might not be expected to want in a new tab but do.
Some claim that modals are bad design and I wholeheartedly agree, though for a variety of reasons they still keep showing up across numerous systems. I guess a compromise could be giving the modal open state its own URL so the app would know what to do if the page is refreshed (the modal would still be open), but somehow that doesn't get much attention either.
An especially clever option (for niche cases) would be being able to open a modal in a tab/window of its own, without the surrounding UI, when opened directly through the URL/new tab/new window, but show it inline in the app during normal navigation. Then again, many dislike pop-ups either because that's not really the direction in which web development went, though I can see why in certain sites they could be useful (e.g. CRUD apps with lots of boring tables and element selection). Oh well.
nothing is more painful when, after scrolling through an control-clicking some things that might be what you're looking for, seeing 5 or more tabs open, and then realising that they're all just the default homepage.
It is extra work for sure, but usability improvements usually are, and if you know what you are doing, this will not cost that much extra in maintenance.
In particular it shouldn't change the original page at all, that's the whole point!
Now, if the original page is the kind that updates in real time (due to accesses from other tabs or even from other machines), just use a web socket!
You also have to disconnect styling from HTML tags for your headings to get the h1>h2>h3 order semantically correct for accessibility and SEO.
Regardless, I think designers making links appear as buttons is bad practice, but you usually don't have much influence over design as a developer.
Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of enterprise software and even banking sites, that:
* try to prevent you from having more than one tab open
* try to prevent you from having more than one session open
More so, sometimes the explanation for this is "security", which just feels like the people behind the system design wanted to be lazy in regards to various lifecycles in the application. If I have my internet banking site open, pay for some goods in an e-commerce store in another tab through the banking integration and then refresh the banking site, me being signed out of it feels like a design flaw, not a "security" feature.
But oh well, you don't really get a say in these things, your bank is going to do whatever they feel like in regards to their UI/UX, as will those behind whatever piece of enterprise software that you have to use, or that you'll have to write in accordance with the requirements.
It's up there in regards to annoyance, much like ctrl clicking some element, just to discover that it doesn't let you open up new tabs, or maybe even right clicking something or trying to select text, just to realize that neither works and you have to copy whatever you need out of the source of the page.
The statement I made is not a genuine expression of the most important reasons - it is a tool to persuade management using cherry picked boogiemen to scare foklks into the right decision... aka a bad faith argument made for the best of reasons.
To make it worse ctrl/cmd click for opening it in a new tab doesn’t always work. Sometimes it open the repo you clicked on in a new tab, sometimes it opens a new tab but with your most recent repo, and sometimes it just opens the repo in the current tab. It is infuriating…
Azure DevOps is still utterly shit though.
I think there are plenty of reasons to choose Azure Cloud. Maybe Azure Devops flows from that. But it is far from my favourite tool.
A poor implementation of a generally sensible approach is not justification to embrace a more complex and error-prone approach.
…But there is a network in between. I'm not sure why pretending there isn't can somehow make a system less complex.
Furthermore, how do you write automated tests for your modals and slide-out panels? Your test suite needs to essentially run a browser. This is absolutely more complex than having an application on the server compute the document that the client expects.
That's exactly my argument...? Seems to be a misunderstanding.
> I'm not sure why pretending there isn't can somehow make a system less complex.
Yes, that is exactly why pre-SPA web programming was more complex.
> Furthermore, how do you write automated tests for your modals and slide-out panels? Your test suite needs to essentially run a browser. This is absolutely more complex than having an application on the server compute the document that the client expects.
How do you test that the HTML/JS generated by the server actually show a modal? At least with libraries like React you can test everything up to the actual CSS engine. And no, you don't need a browser for that.
> How do you test that the HTML/JS generated by the server actually show a modal?
You can test for the existence of markup on page load. You can't test that some JavaScript for displaying a modal has run without running a JavaScript runtime, i.e., a [headless] browser.
In most cases, just loading a page which displays the appropriate information for the user is cheaper to test and implement, and usually is a better experience for the user also. It depends of course — this would not be true of an application like Google Maps. Most web applications aren't Google Maps though.
It's absurd their engineers haven't fixed something so simple.
I just want everything to always open in a new tab (or sometimes a new window). gmail yep, music sites yep, youtube yep.
https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1268661032890896387
One of the most annoying examples I encounter on a regular basis is in Twitter's trends sidebar, where they don't use links, but instead have manually added event listeners for ctrl-click and middle-click.
If you're using Gmail, you get both types of behavior on the same page!
If your mouse has a scroll-wheel, then it's probably clickable as a middle-click. If you have a trackpad without a 3rd button then there is usually a gesture that will send a middle click.