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Comment by blahedo | Hacker News Reader

I do not have sufficient profanity in my verbal arsenal for websites that override basic, fundamental browser behaviour because they think they know better than I do what I actually meant to do. I have noticed Medium being a regular perpetrator of this sort of broken behaviour before.

That one of the developers at Medium could run into such a glowing example of one of the many reasons it's nasty to override browser behaviour, and take the lesson from it that oh hey, we just need to make our override logic more complicated... the blindness and idiocy and sheer bloodymindedness of this response I just can't even.

Medium: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

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While for the most part I agree with you, there are sometimes when it seems... appropriate. Take, for example, Google Docs. I'm used to hitting CTRL-S when working on just about any paper. If I had the save website dialog pop up every time I hit CTRL-S, I would start to get annoyed. I'm glad that Google Docs doesn't do that. A similar case can be made here.

I can count with an amputated hand the number of times I had to save a website. Overriding the ctrl+S shortcut is the appropriate move here.

I wonder if the shortcut should be removed. Certainly some people use the feature, but it seems obscure enough that maybe we should pass that combination on to the website, instead.

The feature is rather useful for record-keeping purposes (also known as CYA).

Though you get an html file and a folder with all the external assets, which I find to be pretty annoying. Safari did a single .webarchive file, but I don't think anyone else ever standardized on something like that.

It often wrecks the layout, but I tend to print to PDF rather than deal with saved html files.

Save-As writing bunch of resources, that when loaded back into the browser might even be broken by lack of external resources are also, in my oppinion, a bad way to keep evidence (e.g. CYA). If you need it to persuade a non-computer-savvy person of something stated on a website, I'd say a bunch of random files in a directory is also much less convincing than a "printed-to" pdf, or screenshots you can easily mail around.

Regarding the .webarchive, I think IE supports another type of "web archive", with a .mht ending.

Opera and IE support MHTML (MIME HTML), it seems to work alright

A website should save your work as you go.

No fucking excuse.

In both cases, Google Docs and Medium, the website does save your work as you go. What is being discussed is the HUMAN habit of pressing Ctrl-S.

Ah. I'd missed that point.

Too used to G+ which fails in this case.

If you ask me web browser's stole CTRL+S! It used to mean "save my work", but in a browser it means "download a copy of the website I am viewing", which seems totally different to me. I can't remember ever wanting that behavior.

I agree with you that websites shouldn't override useful browser behavior, but I'm OK with websites restoring CTRL+S to it's rightful meaning of saving my work.

It's a holdover from when people who made web browsers imagined them being used for browsing web pages, not as an application run time.

It means "Save the thing I'm looking at".

Ctrl-S says to your browser "I want to save this".

Except, it generally doesn't mean that either. It means "download the page again and save that - nevermind if what I'm looking at has changed since it was retrieved". Which also breaks the mental model of "save my work", even if you're just typing text into a form.

Yes, you have all my votes. Words cannot describe the ire which consumes me when cute webdevs reinvent everything because it works on their industrial-grade computers with perfect internet. I agree. So. Much.

But.

It pains me to say this: what else would you want to have happen when a user presses Ctrl+S?

Are they really wrong, here? Wouldn't a user expect a "save blog" on Ctrl+S? How would I explain to a non-tech user why Ctrl+S works in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, but not in Medium?

Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour!

1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when writing documents. I don't know actually anybody who does. Autosave in Word functions as it should (not needing any user action) since at least 1998. My code editors and IDEs all do autosave too before compiling. What's the auctual benefit of ever using Ctrl-S in the middle of writing?

I've lost too much data to trust to autosave. When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time (I write Scala, I don't have the RAM to do that) - I want it to wait for an explicit Ctrl-S to tell it that I've finished a meaningful section and it should compile now. I have exactly the same thing on prose.io (which I write on a lot, and which looks very similar to medium), where "saving" means creating a git commit - I don't want an automatic commit for every letter I type, but I do want to commit very frequently, after each paragraph or similar unit. Rather like when programming.

It becomes a mental tic, an "I've finished the paragraph" instinct. And I'm very glad medium handles it.

What do you use actually that doesn't have "undo"? I can "undo" the whole day of my work on the file until I close it in the IDE. Whatever is "lost" I can return to the previous point.

If you're asking why I use git at all, my IDE crashes often enough that I don't want it to be my sole store of history; also I want that history available to my colleagues or my future self, weeks or months from now.

When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time

Can you explain this? Is it common to use an IDE that autocompiles every time it autosaves?

It's the way I'm used to working, I can't say how common it is. Put it this way: I want to control when it compiles, and I want it to be very obvious if the error markers aren't up to date. So the setup I currently have is eclipse with automatic compilation but manual saving; the possible states are saved and up to date, unsaved (obvious from stars in the title bar) or still compiling just after a save (obvious from progress in the status bar). When I tried to use IntelliJ with its autosaving I found I was pushing code to master that didn't even compile, because I would make a change and then not realize that this had broken something.

> Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority.

My first reaction: How else do you save?! You mean you actually take your hands off the keyboard, and click the floppy icon in a toolbar? Or even.. click on File > Save? Seriously?

I think this assumption as a very strong population bias.

With the people I work with.. it's all about keyboard shortcuts. If you don't know your basic keyboard shortcuts, you're too slow. But then again, I work around people with super customized Vim and EMacs configs and people who live in Photoshop/Illustrator all day. You just can't be productive in those environments without keyboard shortcuts.

For me, users who don't do "Ctrl-S" to save are certainly a minority.

Agreed. I also used ctrl-shift-p to preview Github comments with similar frequency while composing, and get frustrated when I get print dialogues in my mail window.

> I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when writing documents. I don't know actually anybody who does

I, for one, used to have this habit. The notion of "not knowing anyone who uses Ctrl + S" is a bit funny - are you really aware whether people around you do this or not? How does it come up?

By watching normal non-programmers people like my girlfriends and programmers people like my colleagues with whom I worked closely. Former just don't do any Ctrl-anything during the writing. The later simply never needed Ctrl-S, just like I. Autosave really works in the most common tool, Word. When my girlfriend lost her work, it was never for the autosave, but for manually saving over something she did before or Word corrupting the file during the save (the corrupted file was still luckily readable by OpenOffice).

By watching normal non-programmers people like my girlfriends and programmers people like my colleagues with whom I worked closely. Former just don't do any Ctrl-anything during the writing.

[Dr. Watson's voice] He does that thing again!

The actual benefit of using ctrl-S (or cmd-S for us Mac folk) is that autosave is still not ubiquitous, and I'd much rather press cmd-S regularly when it's not necessary than fail to press it and then discover that I needed it. The great thing is that it's basically instantaneous now so it costs nothing to press it every few words, which definitely wasn't the case when I acquired the reflex in the late 80s or early 90s.

For this particular default I see no problem in overriding it. I'm sure there's only a minority that routinely uses ctrl-S to save a lot, but essentially nobody uses ctrl-S to save a web page that contains a document they're in the middle of editing, given how esoteric that is and how unlikely it is to produce a useful result.

That's not to say that overriding defaults is good in general. But there's no need to be consistent about it. Overriding ctrl-S is totally different from overriding the arrow keys, for example.

I use some particularly crashy software at work, and even when autosave does work I have to play "Damn it, where did they put the autosave folder?" If I've saved in the last few minutes I can usually just redo it faster than finding the most recent save file.

I ought to keep a shortcut to that on my desktop.

Make that shortcut now before you forget about it again!

It's a symptom of this latest "push all functionality to javascript" fad, and I can't wait until people wake up to the fact that it's just this generation's Flash.

In-browser WYSIWYG or markdown editing is not good UX design. Period. Full stop. It's never been better than an offline text editor, and when you try to present a cross-browser experience, this is what inevitably happens.

I wasn't around for it, but I feel like this same thing could be said for cross-platform compilers or VMs... Javascript is just newer. It seems like your argument in the second paragraph could be applied to the infant Java VM or GCC. It seems a little myopic.

I'm unaware of any GCC hotkeys.

I haven't used Medium, so I can't speak to it, but in my experience the most frustrating instance of this behavior is from Stack Overflow. Keybindings such as `Ctrl`+`k` and `Ctrl`+`b`, which are native to OS X, behave completely unexpectedly in Stack Overflow textareas, to the extent that I sometimes just give up and compose my text in an external editor.

I've grown accustomed to writing longer comments or posts in an external editor, simply because I've too frequently experienced browser crashes, or an inadvertent (or absent-minded) screen refresh. Alt-backspace is my worst offender, as I use that ALL the time in the shell for text editing, whereas in a browser it navigates backwards.

Worst of all, I can't seem to find a way to alter the keybinds, or (more importantly) the mouse-5-means-go-back gesture.

I'm not sure if it's happening now, but at one point in time F5 wouldn't work to reload the page if twitter is loaded.

And not to mention google plus, that swallows Ctrl+PgDown and Ctrl+PgUp, which happen to be shortcuts to move through tabs. So you are moving through tabs, then you suddenly stop, and you have to reach for the mouse.

Not only it would not reload the page, it would retweet the currently selected tweet. It was silly.

But what's really silly is that the browser actually allows a webpage to override such a basic shortcut like F5.

Twitter also once hooked CTRL+F (find in windows) so it can favor the currrent tweet. Horrible.

That sounds like a deliberate dark pattern. Try to reload? Retweeted. Looking for something? Favorited.

Google's search results page hijacks all typed input without modifier keys. I often use / to begin an in-page-search in Firefox. But not on Google!

What is the right approach to have the in-browser editor save? Users may want to manually trigger a save because it makes them feel safe before they close a browser tab.

While I sympathize with a lot of the "don't usurp the browser" arguments, this is really the correct answer. Whether or not it is logical, the fact is we are software developers who create software for USERS.

Thats why some people disable javascript.

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