I get unreasonably (okay, reasonably) upset when the simplest way to share an image is to take a screenshot of the image.
F12 > Network > Images > (select image) > Save Response As…
Seems like a lot of steps, but you get the hang of it pretty quickly. And probably faster than cropping your screenshot, plus you get the original without any compression or other degradations.
Not at all unreasonable imho!
My other favourite is screenshot > Google lens > select text …
I have to do this all of the time whenever anybody sends me a screenshot of their error message, rather than copying and pasting the error message into the ticket. Or worse still a photo of their screen that shows the error message.
You guys are getting images of errors? It’s like pulling teeth to get that from some users ugh
Also please stop using light colored text on light colored backgrounds, it’s a stupid idea. Thanks for your attention.
To anyone who does this, I’ve found browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox called reading ruler or something like that, that will basically create a highlighted horizontal column wherever your mouse cursor is at, making it much easier to read text without having to manually select it
The point is not to make it easier to read, the point is to click on and select the text.
finally someone who gets it
I think the reading ruler effect is a big part of the accessibility being discussed here. If you want to separate the issues out, consider if browsers didn’t show selected text by inverting the background color, but by e.g. underlining the selected text - you’re right that it’s still important to be able to do that, but the reading ruler is also important.
The use of text selection as a nearly ubiquitous reading ruler is a neat cultural thing that shouldn’t be broken lightly, but it’s not necessarily the only way browsers and websites could implement it.
It’s very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn’t resolve this issue. Assuming you’re on a computer. If you’re not, good luck. Selecting text on phones and tables can be impossible in too many circumstances.
It’s very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn’t resolve this issue.
But I’m not actually looking to select the text when I do this, I’m just stimming and the extra visual noise is annoying.
I don’t think I understand the issue then.
I’m complaining about pop-up widgets appearing when you select text, like the email icon here:
Edge is the absolute worst for this. Infuriating
TL;DR: OP could try using your finger on your phone to keep your place?
Oh boy. I design UI (games, not software) and OP’s very specific need would stomp on a very common need for why people select text… which is to copy/paste.
While on a computer, text selection doesn’t typically summon a pop up, it’s needed in mobile because how else would you easily get to copy and paste? Everyone else would rage at the loss of the tooltip and any other interaction would be painfully hidden if it was delegated to a combo of pressing your lock buttons or volume buttons while highlighting text.
Quick edit: didn’t see the screenshot of the widget, might be the site you’re using, or browser? Also any adblocker add on should be able to hide those elements.
While on a computer, text selection doesn’t typically summon a pop up, it’s needed in mobile because how else would you easily get to copy and paste? Everyone else would rage at the loss of the tooltip and any other interaction would be painfully hidden if it was delegated to a combo of pressing your lock buttons or volume buttons while highlighting text.
The complaint is specifically about desktop text selection though, the screenshot above says “i select text using my mouse”. I agree that removing the pop-up UI from mobile would suck, well suck more than mobile text selection already does.
Quick edit: didn’t see the screenshot of the widget, might be the site you’re using, or browser? Also any adblocker add on should be able to hide those elements.
You’re right, putting
##.quote-share-buttonsin my uBlock filter list got rid of it. Still, blocking all these elements myself is really laborious.Oh yeah, I’m a terrible text block skimmer and desperately need line breaks, punctuation, etc. (Also, not to mention the repetition really triggered my need to skim, lol). That many repeated phrases turned some words into white noise. So that was my bad.
Good to hear the element blocker works!
It def sounds tedious to manually block things, but like some comments have mentioned, there are probably some browser add ons that may have the functionality you seek.
Also: stop fucking redefining hotkeys, and place a toggler for pages where is makes sense (Figma etc., basically a whole complex programs in a webpage)
Totally do this. Thought it was just me.
I do this because I do work on my computer and sometimes that work involves citing sources, copying and pasting sections of instructions, ensuring I’m using correct spelling of foreign names and words. And most importantly, copying and pasting wingdings and symbols that I can’t be bothered to memorize the numkey codes for. ™ 🄮℠
I HATE UNSELECTABLE TEXT WITH A BURNING PASSION (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Edit: replied to wrong comment, whoops.
How do you do that with images?
Not judging. Just curious.
This is what you sound like: Xkcd Workflow
Kinda. Very specific edge case that can be solved with a custom feature like a browser extension.
I do not want the program to react when I left click ordinary text. The program should not anticipate my needs. It should wait until I’ve told it I need something (with a right click) before doing anything.
I’m gonna break your heart then. Until about 15 years ago it used to be that literally all interactable/clickable text was both blue AND UNDERLINED to indicate it was a clickable link. Then some self-important designers with no user experience testing decided that was just too ugly and stopped underlining links to give it a “clean” minimalist look. It was then a trend, so everyone copied it. Now we still live with those consequences :(
I lived in that beautiful era. It was glorious.
skill issue
I love this comment, I see it everywhere and it fills me with fuzzies
So today I learned there is an internet equivalent of reading with your finger while mouthing the words.
I use a system at work that is 100% web based. I have 2 4k monitors in my desk. Why are the apps formatted for viewing on a phone? I’ve gotten to the point of hacking the CSS on every page just to make things usable.
At the last version upgrade, the developers made some changes to the interface. They couldn’t be bothered to change the existing CSS, so they just put !important on all the new stuff.
Mobile first rule.
And then lazy port to desktop.
“it’s mobile first!”
“And desktop second, right?”
“What’s desktop?”
“What’s a desktop?”
At the start of Covid, we had to start working from home. Our Chief Security Idiot thought that was a good time to impose measures that made it impossible to reboot a computer without physical access. When I questioned how that would work with my desktop, which stayed in the office building that I couldn’t legally access, he kept saying I had to take the “laptop” with me. I told him several times that it was a desktop, but he just couldn’t understand until my boss got involved.
That was my first run-in with our idiot-in-charge-of-security, and it only got worse after that.
Please tell us more stories, that sounds entertaining :D
Multiple windows. Most people dislike 2 meter wide text blocks.
May I ask how old you are? And what was the first OS you used?
deleted by creator
Most people dislike
[citation needed]
Most people
Most people people dislike 10x10 cm text windows when programming/editing HTML/reading SQL dumps.
Code and logs don’t count, that’s not normal reading. That’s cheating.
It’s kind of screwed to say. But a lot of people entering the work force grew up with phones and tablets as their main computer. It’s the mind set they have that everything uses touch interfaces.
I’m not saying everyone or even most, but for a good portion it’s their default computer experience.
80% population have access to mobile phones.
The first generation was just that bad ignoring that some people wanted to browse the web through their mobile.
Modern UI designers don’t have a fucking clue.
You’d think the first principle would be “don’t break the existing fucking UI”, but no.
Infinite scroll. Windows without toolbars. Replacing context menu with useless site-specific one. Forcing links to open in new or same tab, depriving the user of choice. Blocking text select. Blocking copy, as if that’s somehow going to stop people from stealing your shitty content. Fucking with the browser history.
And then there’s the constant reinventing of the wheel. How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
What the actual fuck, do these people actually use computers.
My biggest gripe is websites that take control of the browser
C-f.I mean, over the years the scroll bar has got less and less visible. Maybe these people don’t even realise it exists.
I hate how tiny it often is now. What the fuck. Not to mention the ever decreasing contrast.
MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They’re big on form over function which I hate.
Some people are just like that.
I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn’t care that a big chunk of the TV’s functionality was now blocked. They didn’t want to see wires.
Web designer/ devs needed to add back visual indicators to long articles when OS designers started hiding scroll bars.
It’s also helpful when the article ends, but has a bunch of shit below it (like required advertiser garbage or huge footers). If the up dev is smart, they’ll calculate the length of the article so that the progress indicator is accurate.
I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”
I have seen those on blog and news sites, a thin horizontal bar (sometimes under the floating title) that fills as you scroll to the bottom. I don’t get it either.
That was it. So it wasn’t even original stupidity. Sad.
This is a complete misnomer. Modern UI designers that are forced to do what corporate wants are competent. It is large scale marketing that doesn’t have a clue as to what people want in a UX.
Text that doesn’t wrap and goes off screen. Scrollbars that shrink to a single pixel. Universal undo (open multiple Excel Windows and do stuff in all of them. When you undo it will follow your activity instead of being local to the window). Excels crappy copy.
One of the many extremely basic issues with Excel. Absolutely disgusting.
Excel does all those things it does because it’s always done those things it does, and if Microsoft changes it everyone will pitch a fit and probably sue because now they have to retrain their entire accounting department.
I disagree. There are louts of things that would not change old behavior but add so much convenience. Like cell reference for diagram ranges. But nope, we are stuck in 199…4?
I love some of the newer things like LET and LAMBDA. But I’d kill for structured references to be properly implemented everywhere. I’m a bit over using INDIRECT to get around it (when I can).
Yes. I have build dynamic diagrams with indirect, I feel ashamed.
Let us use Python instead of cancerous VBA. You can not even add comments to your variable definitions. Or named vars in functions. Why do I even need macros at all to simply define a function?
You don’t, any more. At least not for relatively simple functions.
LAMBDA combined with the name manager lets you do custom functions even in a regular .xlsx workbook.
You don’t get the full control flow and extended functionality you do in VBA, and Python would be amazing of course, but I find LAMBDA covers about 90% of use cases.
The undo and copy behavior for Excel started with office 365. Also the repeat after hitting the end of the redo stack.
What’s wrong with infinite scroll?
As it’s most often seen on news sites - where scrolling too far gives you another article - a handful of reasons.
One: there are frequently still links (think “about us” / “contact us” kind of pages) in the footer that you might need to access, which you can invariably now never reach, because as soon as they’re in view they’re replaced by more content.
Two: as the parent poster so accurately put it, “fucking with the browser history”. It becomes entirely indeterminate whether the back button now returns to the previous site, or just goes back by one piece of content.
Three: the new content is almost certainly unrelated to the page I started on, and not of any interest to me.
This was just happening to me with Amazon. I wanted to get to the support link in the footer but they always loaded new stuff before I could click on it
Breaks the scroll bar, for starters.
- You want to navigate somewhere then navigate back? Haha, no.
- If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
- Some fuckwit wannabe designers actually put the footer UNDER infinite scrolling pages.
If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
Doing this causes it’s own problems. Try searching on a page that unloads everything out of view. Or saving it
When you’re dragging the scrollbar down, the page suddenly loads new content and you’re lost.
When you’re going through a long page and you want to come back to it later, you can’t come back to where you left.
Plus if you want to find older content, you can’t just skip to a page, you need to scroll through every goddamn item until you find what you’re looking for.
forcing new tabs drives me crazy. like how dare you. i even tried to disable it in firefox, but when i do it makes all ‘open in browser’ things overwrite the current tab :(
I hate the opposite even more - sites that block you from opening new tabs when you need to, as if you somehow don’t ever need to be able to access multiple pieces of information concurrently, or return directly to your current context.
“Oh, we’re following the single-page app paradigm.” No, you’re a fucking website. Follow the fucking website paradigm.
You can just tell these idiots have never actually done any real work.
Y’know, my mom studied human factors psychology back around 2000. I remember all kinds of stuff she’d talk about that could make UIs easier to use, understand, and learn from.
I remember around the time Windows 7 came out, all that type of thinking started being ignored. It seemed like at first it was because it was trendy to look different, and then because the next generation of designers forgot that there was actual science on how to make your stuff usable.
Pretty much spot on. Late 90s and early 2000s was there height of platforms being very careful and strict about things like HIG (or on the other extreme, “skins”).
Now UI is barely constrained by those sensibilities and it’s about marketing and showing novelty more than usable.
A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.
Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.
Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.
This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.
Got any details on the type of stuff your mom shared for improved UIs?
Not much anymore, sorry to say - this was a few decades ago! I remember her showing us some mockups on index cards and other paper-based models, showing what different user actions might display (I was studying computer science at the same time, so it was a bit of a common interest). I also remember her talking about watching groups of users trying to use a piece of software, and using eye tracking along with mouse tracking and other devices to see where their focus tended to be drawn, where they spent their time, etc. as they tried to accomplish certain tasks; studying different aspects of discoverability.
I also remember she was a big fan of Saturn’s cars - apparently they were big into usability, and as a consequence were easy to maintain and tended to avoid things like problematic blind spots. I do remember changing the headlight was extremely easy - you pulled two pins and the whole headlight assembly popped out!
How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
The vibe coding “paradigm” says: once or twice for every checkbox that appears on the page 😂
I hear you! It sounds like you want
user-select: noneon all text, because you want the site to feel more like a real newspaper, and having too many features like text selection is distracting you.The fact that I couldn’t select text on this post because it’s a completely unnecessary graphic kind of makes me hate you.
Hard agree. I’m not dyslexic, but I also occasionally mark text to keep progress, especially if it’s a long piece. And if I really want to copy that text, I will, sometimes just out of spite that you’re trying to outsmart me, and I’m more likely to leave your site sooner too.
Also, while we’re at it, can you please leave scrolling behaviour alone and not override it? I have a nice mouse that lets me scroll as fast or as slow as I want to. In some rare cases with a fancy UI where one wheel notch scrolls a whole page I agree that overriding the behaviour is warranted. In all other cases just FUCKING LEAVE SCROLLING AS IS (as handled by the OS and the browser) and don’t try to be fancy; if you try to be fancy for no particular reason, I’m more likely to leave your site ASAP rather than prefer it over other sites.
Hell yeah josef
I do this too, I’m the only one I know who doesn’t think it’s weird to do, I’m glad I’m not alone.
I’m not sure what it’s a symptom of, but I often mess up reading the correct line when the lines a fairly wide. (I want to say dyslexia? But if I do have that then it’s only mild)
I point with my finger with physical media also when lines are wide enough. It just helps read faster :3
I’m also glad to know I’m not alone in highlighting the text as I go
