> Why do all of the above have ...? No clue.
The "..." convention is used when menu options open a dialog box rather than just immediately doing the action.
> Why do all of the above have ...? No clue.
The "..." convention is used when menu options open a dialog box rather than just immediately doing the action.
Some of these complaints feel like they aren’t specific to Firefox at all, but are UI conventions that used to be ubiquitous and no longer are, much to the chagrin of those of us of a certain age.
He also rails against menu items that are greyed out and unusable, where to me that’s a very useful indicator that the action isn’t available here but that I’m looking in the right place.
When I want to click a menu item and find it greyed out, that tells me something. But when I want to click a menu item and it’s not there at all, I’m confused. Did a developer move it somewhere else? Did the name of the action change? Am I losing my touch?
Indeed both the "..." and "disabling over removing" were in the windows 95 UI manual
They were original in the 1984 Macintosh OS (before it had a name), and published in the first edition (1987) of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.
Just two of the things Microsoft copied successfully. :)
Eh, they were definitely from Xerox (so it would be unclear since that both Windows and the Mac System Software derived some of their UI elements from Xerox experiments)
Also macOS in its various guises, for decades.
I have a lot of questions about the person who wrote that blog post, in that it seems to be a quick hot take without any digging into the reasons why things are the way are
Blog first, ask questions later? It's like c'mon man, have at least a little bit of curiosity...
No idea about author's exact age but I would bet he was born around Y2K (according to his CV) and, well, it's IMO a testament that usability is based on habits, culture and conventions, and it's not a universal truth.
Intuitive equals familar — Jef Raskin https://doi.org/10.1145/182987.584629
"The only intuitive user interface is the nipple."
(usually attributed to Bruce Tognazzini)
This particular line serves only to highlight the author's limited knowledge. I wonder what they meant by it.
Also greyed out options have a point, they only seem "fucking useless" if you don't know it.
You're right, I didn't know about what that "..." meant. It's kind of obvious what I meant though: "I don't know why all of these have ..." I've added that information to the post.
The greyed out options have no point because 99.99% of the links I click are already clean. Like so many of the other privacy enhancing options, just provide an option to "clean links automatically."
Link "cleaning" will sometimes just break a link entirely since it's a heuristic-based thing that removes query parameters that appear to be nonfunctional tracking parameters. Doing it by default would be setting up users for the occasional very bad experience.
Specifically, it means that more information is required to complete the task (e.g. requesting the filename for saving a file). If the action is literally about opening that dialog (e.g. something like "Show Properties"), the ellipsis is not needed.
The practical use is that the user knows they will still have the opportunity to back out of the operation, and not commit to it by the first click. I don’t think “will need more input” is that useful as an information by itself.
At first I was going to say that the opportunity to back out and the need for more input are identical: if the dialog consists only of a button to proceed and a button to back out, the user needs to choose one of those as input, and eliminating that need for input means eliminating the opportunity to back out.
But now I'm thinking that a need and an opportunity are very distinct. For example, browsers used to present a Save dialog during a download: was there a need for input? No, accepting the default filename works, and based on that, they no longer offer the opportunity to choose a filename. Thus, "..." indicates the opportunity, even if there is no true need.
I feel old. Every single millennial versed into computers knows about this convention, which I think probably comes from Windows, back when they paid their employees to care.
+1 This has been true for, what, 30 years?
At least 40 years, since it was already present in Windows 1.0 (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-SuAaYDZIk for an example).
The original Macintosh software also did this, back in 1984.
From the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, published in 1986: "The application dims an item when the user can't choose it. If the user moves the pointer over a dimmed item, that item isn't highlighted."
There may well have been prior art, but that's as far back as my knowledge goes.
The article's author doesn't appear to be particularly tech-literate. I flagged the post on the grounds that it doesn't meet HN standards in general.
It's strange, because they do know about:config....
[flagged]