UI Bites
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@remi is this GDPR consent dialog? They're specifically built to be as dysfunctional and confusing as possible, to maximize the number of people who accidentally agree to everything.
I think I read somewhere that they're working on amending the GDPR to disallow that practice.
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phones don't actually show scroll bars while you're not scrolling
And desktops have decided that's good too.
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@PleegWat they must have disallowed something already - I remember the first iteration of "consent" dialogues was like, click here to agree to everything, or click here to get redirected to a 3rd party website that will take 5 minutes to load the list of 400 "partners", each with his own individual switch that creates one do-not-track cookie, and there's a button "disable all" that was supposed to do all the work but instead 350 of the 400 partners had a timeout or some other kind of error so the cookie wasn't set.
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@loopback0 I know several websites that used to use these but then stopped. There must've been some reason for that.
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@Gąska They're terrible user experience and less stupid ways of doing it were developed.
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@loopback0 you don't understand. Terrible user experience is the goal.
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@Gąska Something has indeed changed very recently. I read something about it yesterday in a newspaper and searched a bit. The French privacy watchdog (CNIL) has indeed issues new guidelines on how the GDPR should be implemented last October, with a deadline for implementation of 31st March 2021. So of course most websites have waited until that date to do anything, if they've done anything at all about it.
See e.g. here for the full thing (in French,
to find an English article about it but there are probably tons): https://www.cnil.fr/fr/nouvelles-regles-cookies-et-autres-traceurs-bilan-accompagnement-cnil-actions-a-venirRoughly, they say that consent must be a positive action from the user (i.e. clicking on "accept"). Simply continuing to browse a website must be interpreted as refusal. A recommendation is for a "reject" button on the same level as the "accept" button, or that closing the cookies banners be equalled to "reject", but hiding that button in a secondary dialog (accessed from e.g. "more information") is not compliant with GDRP. They also strongly recommend, for clarity and ease of understanding, to have a first level short description of cookies, and only put the full description in a secondary level.
Now obviously this is just the French privacy watchdog doing its thing so non-French websites are free to ignore it (cue the usual
about "universal jurisdiction", the garage is 
), and given how toothless overall that watchdog is (though... not entirely, as evidenced by the fact that enough websites have changed their cookies dialog that we've all noticed it!), even French websites can probably ignore it.But given also how many websites are just copying JS snippets from the same places, I expect that the "standard" JS code for those dialogs will get updated and thus quite a lot of sites will be updated to this new type of dialog without much effort from developers.
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What in the actual fuck.
I was adding a webservice reference in VS and it kept asking me for credentials, as well as showing me a prompt asking if I was sure I wanted to send the credentials in clear text (note: the URL was https://. But sure, the credentials would be sent in clear text to the server, I suppose).
By "kept asking" I mean upwards of ten times, I'm guessing once for each available method?
After many hours of trying to get around this, I finally found this SO answer FROM 2012, nearly a decade ago.
After you enter your credentials at least once correctly and you are prompted a second time, DON'T DO ANYTHING FURTHER for 30-60 seconds (I just made that up, YMMV). If you wait on the prompt and then click Cancel, the service reference may be sitting there waiting for you to add to the project.
From what I am seeing, Visual Studio gets in a hurry and re-prompts you before it has time to download the WSDL and/or generate proxy classes.
Still relevant in VS2019. FFS.
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@Zecc
MS:E_NOT_OUR_PROBLEM_YOUR_INTERNET_SUCKS
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@loopback0 you don't understand. Terrible user experience is the goal.
But they still want some user experience. And if people just close the page and never come back it could actually lead to sites looking for acceptably user hostile ways to do the same thing.
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@boomzilla there's always the big button that says "accept all" that instantly dismisses all popups and lets you use the website hassle free. This part is super intuitive and super easy - so easy in fact that you can easily click it unintentionally. It's everything else that's obnoxiously hard to do.
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@Gąska I get that. I'm just saying...if they saw that people wanted to turn stuff off (which they figured must be the case because the users went to the maze of settings page) and then never came back, and if there were enough of them that it was making a dent in sales or something, they might abandon that specific approach for fine tuning.
No doubt plenty of other people just click accept (that's what I tend to do, because meh).
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@boomzilla said in UI Bites:
if they saw that people wanted to turn stuff off (which they figured must be the case because the users went to the maze of settings page) and then never came back, and if there were enough of them that it was making a dent in sales or something, they might abandon that specific approach for fine tuning.
Here's the thing: you can't monetize people who opted out nearly as effectively as those who opted in. If you're a free website that survives on ads, almost all ad clicks will come from the latter group, and if you're a business selling products and services, those who opted out won't fall for your salesmanship bullshit and you'll make much less money on them. Overall, driving opt-outers out isn't a huge loss, business-wise.
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@Gąska we were discussing why sites might have gotten rid of the most awful things. I was just putting forth a possible reason why.
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@boomzilla fair enough.
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Windows' "Combine taskbar buttons when the task is full" behaves interestingly when the taskbar is moved to the side.
⇒ No change in number of Firefox windows
Just opened two new applications⇒ 
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Windows' "Combine taskbar buttons when the task is full" behaves interestingly when the taskbar is moved to the side.
Even Windows knows that having the taskbar on the side is
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@Zecc What's the point of combining the buttons (on the left while it still “works”) when the button still takes up the same space as the individual buttons would? Shouldn't it be just one row?
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@loopback0 said in UI Bites:
Windows' "Combine taskbar buttons when the task is full" behaves interestingly when the taskbar is moved to the side.Even Windows knows that having the taskbar on the side is
True, I only ever did that on macOS.
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@Zecc What's the point of combining the buttons (on the left while it still “works”) when the button still takes up the same space as the individual buttons would? Shouldn't it be just one row?
This actually works most of the time. It does collapse it to the size of a single button.
It then expands it back when I hover over the group button.This occasionally results in interesting back-and-forths as different groups of buttons collapse and expand.
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@Zecc Long live jellybeans¹.
¹ I thought we had an emoji for jellybeans… or was it only in dicksource?
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With Web versions of Office 365 (which I believe includes the embeds in Teams), or at least Notes, you can turn off autocarrot, but it will turn itself on on any page switch or reload. There is even a Q/A and uservoice about it:
Of course, no action.
Also, I wanted to vote on the uservoice page
so I clicked login, got the e-mail, clicked the link, reloaded the page and… there is no indication it would recognize me now.
Also:
Bonus
: The discussion in that link is threaded, but not shown as such, and the pagination seems to work strangely.
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These are maybe more UX than UI, but whatever.
Procrastinating on my taxes.
UI/UX bite #1: E-file Federal return; mostly no problem. Try to return to the site to get info for my state return; it turns out I also need to print a paper copy to attach to the state return because I can't e-file it. No dice. It refuses to accept the password I'm pasting from KeePass. I know it's the right password, because password manager, but it won't accept it. Attempt a password reset. One-time code to my email. It takes it, but wants further verification. Send another one-time code to my phone. After multiple attempts and waiting a hour for T-Mobile to deign to deliver a text, I get 3 or 4 all at once. Enter the most recent. Huzzah! "Enter new password" It expressed delight with the complexity of the new password from KeePass. Try to log in with the new password. BZZZZT! No login for you. No error message. Nothing other than a brief (usually very, very brief) graying of the LOGIN button to indicate that it even tried to process the login attempt. And the "Contact customer service" link does not, in fact, contact customer service, but goes to a set of generic help pages, which are about stuff like how to fill out the forms, and contains absolutely nothing (that I can find, anyway) related in any way to site access problems.
UI/UX bite #2: I can't e-file my state taxes (for
that aren't particularly relevant here), so start filling out the fillable PDF to print out and mail. The PDF has validation for certain fields. Enter SSN as 999999999. "Does not meet the format requirement of 999-99-9999" Try to arrow over and insert the hyphens; insert one. 999-999999 "Does not meet the format requirement of 999-99-9999" The validation then removes the one hyphen I have inserted. Try this a few times; it always tries to validate the field as soon as the first hyphen. Ok. Delete the contents and start from scratch. 999- "Does not meet the format ..." No matter what I do, it validates the field before I can finish typing it. Finally, resort to typing the SSN in Notepad and copy-pasting it into the PDF. Yay, that worked. Now do that on all the other places it wants my SSN.At the end, it wants email and phone contact info. Same problem, but even better. First it tells me 9999999999 doesn't meet the format specification 999-9999. What? No area code? That isn't possibly going to work? There are a bunch of area codes in California; the chances that I'd be in whatever area code the tax bureaucrat might call from are small, even if my phone had a California area code, which it doesn't. Try 999-999-9999. Doesn't meet the specification (999) 999-9999. Ok try putting the are code in
()instead of using a hyphen. It tries to validate as soon as I type the second). Try copy-pasting the correctly formatted number from Notepad. Field is length-limited; it truncates the last two digits.
Finally, pasting the unformatted 10-digit number manages to get past the validation. If they need to contact me by phone, the bureaucrat is just going to have to deal with it.No, it didn't; it silently truncated it to 7 digits.
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
area code
That is still distinct? Around here we dropped the distinction around the introduction of cell phones. All numbers are 9 digits after the country prefix, and you always dial all 9 digits. The ‘area codes’ only remained for allocation, and for cell phones are operator-based rather than location-based.
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
I know it's the right password, because password manager, but it won't accept it.
@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
Try to log in with the new password. BZZZZT! No login for you.
I smell a password being silently chopped off at an arbitrary length.
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
At the end, it wants email and phone contact info. Same problem, but even better. First it tells me 9999999999 doesn't meet the format specification 999-9999. What? No area code? That isn't possibly going to work? There are a bunch of area codes in California; the chances that I'd be in whatever area code the tax bureaucrat might call from are small, even if my phone had a California area code, which it doesn't. Try 999-999-9999. Doesn't meet the specification (999) 999-9999. Ok try putting the are code in
()instead of using a hyphen. It tries to validate as soon as I type the second). Try copy-pasting the correctly formatted number from Notepad. Field is length-limited; it truncates the last two digits. Finally, pasting the unformatted 10-digit number manages to get past the validation. If they need to contact me by phone, the bureaucrat is just going to have to deal with it.It's most common for UK phone number entry fields to auto-insert the formatting as you type the number in; I never looked at what the actual contents of the field are in those cases. And there's a mix of some numbers having area codes and some just having basic category prefixes (
07for mobile phone numbers, and08and09for “special” numbers). And area codes are not all the same length but nobody really cares anymore because who enters phone numbers by hand these days like a caveman?
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
area code
That is still distinct? Around here we dropped the distinction around the introduction of cell phones. All numbers are 9 digits after the country prefix, and you always dial all 9 digits. The ‘area codes’ only remained for allocation, and for cell phones are operator-based rather than location-based.
The area codes are still geographically based, but it's generally no longer safe to assume any number is going to be local, since the area code for a cell phone number is based on where you lived when you got the number, and there's no requirement to change it when you move. At least I haven't been able to dial anything as a local number in years, as my phone has a western WA area code, but I don't live or dial numbers in that area.
@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
At the end, it wants email and phone contact info. Same problem, but even better. First it tells me 9999999999 doesn't meet the format specification 999-9999. What? No area code? That isn't possibly going to work? There are a bunch of area codes in California; the chances that I'd be in whatever area code the tax bureaucrat might call from are small, even if my phone had a California area code, which it doesn't. Try 999-999-9999. Doesn't meet the specification (999) 999-9999. Ok try putting the are code in
()instead of using a hyphen. It tries to validate as soon as I type the second). Try copy-pasting the correctly formatted number from Notepad. Field is length-limited; it truncates the last two digits. Finally, pasting the unformatted 10-digit number manages to get past the validation. If they need to contact me by phone, the bureaucrat is just going to have to deal with it.It's most common for UK phone number entry fields to auto-insert the formatting as you type the number in; I never looked at what the actual contents of the field are in those cases. And there's a mix of some numbers having area codes and some just having basic category prefixes (
07for mobile phone numbers, and08and09for “special” numbers). And area codes are not all the same length but nobody really cares anymore because who enters phone numbers by hand these days like a caveman?I expected autoformatting the number, too, if it cared so much about the format, but no, the PDF isn't that smart.
In the US, I think a few of the most densely populated areas use different area codes for mobile and landline phone, but in most of the US, the area code is simply geographic (except cell phones that migrate from other areas).
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
I know it's the right password, because password manager, but it won't accept it.
@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
Try to log in with the new password. BZZZZT! No login for you.
I smell a password being silently chopped off at an arbitrary length.
Or those silly special characters. (Yo! Bobby Tables!)
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That is still distinct? Around here we dropped the distinction around the introduction of cell phones. All numbers are 9 digits after the country prefix, and you always dial all 9 digits. The ‘area codes’ only remained for allocation, and for cell phones are operator-based rather than location-based.
There are probably still some area codes where you can still dial just the 7 digits (instead of 10). That goes away as soon as they bring in a new area code and overlay it (as opposed to the old way of splitting an area code into 2 distinct areas). I remember (
) the uproar when overlays were first introduced... "OMG! I have to dial 10 digits now!?!" Those were the pre-cellphone days.
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It's most common for UK phone number entry fields to auto-insert the formatting as you type the number in
I forget which bank/etc it is, but it sometimes pops up the "please update your info" page. Yeah, nothings changed - I click 'ok' (or cancel) before noticing the phone number is "wrong" - because I originally typed 1234567890. The page wants me to format it. (No! You!)
Edit: Just noticed who. It's Paypal. And when it shows the page, the number is formatted. I click 'ok', the number reformats to unformatted and the "error: number must be formatted" (close enough) message appears just before the page is cleared and I continue to where I was going.
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
The area codes are still geographically based, but it's generally no longer safe to assume any number is going to be local, since the area code for a cell phone number is based on where you lived when you got the number, and there's no requirement to change it when you move.
Some of them overlap, too. In some (many?) areas you have to dial all 10 digits.
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@Zecc said in The Official Status Thread:
Updated Firefox to 89.0.
OK so this is stupid.
Earlier versions of Firefox had a
icon when a tab was playing sound but it was inline with the tab title.New Firefox moves the tab title upwards to insert a word underneath thats inexplicably in caps.
Lines up really well with the other tabs.
New Firefox still shows this icon instead of the favicon when you mouseover the tab but it doesn't affect the other crap.
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@loopback0
I'm glad it's blocked the autoplay, but...
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@loopback0 said in UI Bites:
OK so this is stupid.
I've already accidentally closed the wrong tab once today...
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@dcon You close tabs???
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@HardwareGeek said in UI Bites:
@dcon You close tabs???
Yeah! And I can find those tabs again so I don't have open yet-another!
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And I can find those tabs again so I don't have open yet-another!
That's why Chrome added a "Search Tabs" button
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@TimeBandit said in UI Bites:
And I can find those tabs again so I don't have open yet-another!
That's why Chrome added a "Search Tabs" button
That must be new. I always use the awesome bar to find my tabs.
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Yeah! And I can find those tabs again so I don't have open yet-another!
That's what
%(in the address/search bar) is for.@TimeBandit said in UI Bites:
That's why Chrome added a "Search Tabs" button
Firefox has that too:
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@loopback0 said in UI Bites:
OK so this is stupid.
And then some people mocked me some time ago when I said I didn't want to switch to Firefox (in part) because of their regular breaking of their UI...
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@loopback0 said in UI Bites:
OK so this is stupid.
And then some people mocked me some time ago when I said I didn't want to switch to Firefox (in part) because of their regular breaking of their UI...
That’s because it’s mildly annoying, compared to Google’s “hell no”.
We like to complain about mildly annoying. It’s what we do here.
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@loopback0 said in UI Bites:
OK so this is stupid.
And then some people mocked me some time ago when I said I didn't want to switch to Firefox (in part) because of their regular breaking of their UI...
It's not particularly frequent. There's not been a significant change for ages.
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@loopback0 They have to lull you into a false sense of comfort to make the next change more jarring. If it was changing too often, you'd get used to the constant change.
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@remi And yesterday was the Day of the Jarring Change for No Good Reason.
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Also known as "Windows 10 As Usual Day".
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A phone number is an integer, isn't it?
Normally, we use a forward slash / between area code and local number, like 069/1234567, but this German web site insisted on a slash free version. Hope they don't erase the leading 0 (or do their staff know to add a 0 when no leading 0 is present?).
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Dear Visual Studio,
are you really sure that the local variable 'thread' is never used?
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It pisses me off that Windows File Explorer says "This folder is empty" instead of "Forking shirtballs, I/O is so slow we still haven't been able to list any of the files in this directory".
Never ever lie to me, computer.
Area codes 703 and 571 - Wikipedia
