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Comment by pennomi | Hacker News Reader

What would dramatically increase my user experience is removing the absolutely pointless keyboard shortcuts from the browser. For example, nobody needs ctrl-s to download the html source of a page. (It’s especially annoying for users like me because it’s reflexive to type ctrl-s when editing large blocks of text.)

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But many people need ctrl-s to download pdf files rendered in the browser. Yes there is a button but that is a shortcut after all.

Is that even the default setting? I believe my ff auto downloads linked pdfs

Data files like PDF, JPEG, MP3, etc. are different than HTML pages. It’s sensible to keep the shortcut for those because they are useful files outside of the browser environment.

It’s virtually never useful to have a shortcut to save HTML pages.

You should be able to change this in about:config no?

I use Ctrl-s often to save images.

To my knowledge it is impossible to change this behavior in Firefox. You can hackily override it by adding an extension which injects some js that captures the ctrl-s keys, but that can also break sites that legitimately use that functionality.

Data files like images are a reasonable use of the shortcut. Downloading HTML is nearly always unintended behavior.

What are you suggesting ctrl-s does when editing large blocks of text? In almost every Windows app it saves the document.

Nothing, probably. I could be convinced of something else if it’s a good idea. But the current behavior of interrupting the user with a save HTML page dialog is always wrong UX in that case.

I don't get it then. You expect ctrl-s to do nothing. So why would you press it at all?

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