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Comment by seppo0010 | Hacker News Reader

I think the article is too verbose when knowing the context the bug is trivial: you intercepted meta+s and ctrl+s and in the way you broke alt+s.

I find the save dialog useless for web browsers as well, but I think preventing its use is a bad idea in general. Overriding the browser's shortcut is uncomfortable. For example, wordpress likes to capture cmd+<number> to change the font style, but that's how I usually change the active tab. It also disables ctrl+tab, the other way I use to escape while the text area is active.

People use their browsers and have their workflow in them. Breaking them needs to have a really good excuse. http://xkcd.com/1172/

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But the article explains why they override ctrl-s. It is because the users had muscle memory to keep hitting ctrl-s to save, since they were used to not having an auto-save function built in. But more than that, is the idea of a web browser as an app delivery platform. If a web browser is running an app (such as a word processor, or spreadsheet, or anything but browsing the web) it is sometimes necessary and beneficial to turn over browser-reserved keystrokes to the app in question. The only time to expect browser shortcut keys to work normally is when browsing a web page (vs. using the browser to run an application).

Indeed, allowing the browser's default Ctrl+S action to take effect would be actively harmful. It'd trigger a behavior that's completely useless to the user (saving the active web page as HTML), but which could easily be mistaken for doing something useful.

.. another relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1479/

Pfft. Or you could just press Alt-Space, M, and then the arrow keys to "bind" the move to the mouse movement. This will let you bring the dialog back onscreen.

On second thought, I'll be glad when I don't have to know that.

The actual bug was trivial, the backstory was really interesting - it's the kind of thing you'd hear about on the 99% Invisible podcast. Sometimes verbosity is nice, after all, who doesn't like to share a good bug-hunt story?

It could have been written in quarter of the words.

So could your comment.

Not mention the sites that hijack "/" for their search. I don't think there's a single site that hijacked keys which ended up being a good idea (at least from my experience).

I think browsers need option to disable key hijacking.

It'd drive me crazy if Gmail _didn't_ do that. Love the keyboard shortcuts, including and especially the ones that override. Highly productive compared to the alternative.

> Highly productive compared to the alternative.

I dunno; I really preferred the alternative I used to have: reading email in a proper email client. The only reason I use the web client now is that it's easier when I'm also using my phone to read mail away from my computer. And I'm strongly considering just returning to desktop-only email; that's how much I miss reading mail in gnus.

I read my GMail email in a desktop client and on my tablet and have no problem. Why did you have to switch away from gnus?

At the time I was heavily using local groups (folders) to organise the emails, and of course those weren't living on Google's servers—and if I were going to leave them up on the server, I might as well choose to organise them differently, since I wouldn't have gnus filtering them for me.

And I think there was some trouble with IMAP at the time too, so the path of least resistance was to just use the web client on my desktop. But, as I noted, I'm thinking of going back.

God, I'm glad I haven't run into these sites. There needs to be a browser extension to prevent this.

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