Tag: ‘browsers’ · TangleBones

Background Tab Strangeness

In the past I’ve noticed some strange behav­iors in WebKit based browsers, espe­cially when open­ing tabs in the back­ground. For instance, some­times if a page con­tains an embed­ded YouTube video (or the like), Safari on the Mac won’t load the video unless you go to the tab and reload the whole page. Frus­trat­ing, but no big deal.

I was will­ing to chalk that up to the ever-​crappy Mac ver­sion of the Adobe Flash plugin (so slow, Adobe! Why do you hate us?), but then I opened a link to this nifty new Javascript-​based graph­ing library in a back­ground tab in Google Chrome and when I clicked over got this:

(It’s a little tricky to see, but a bunch of the graph’s labels are way off to the left.)

Now, Safari on Win­dows doesn’t have this prob­lem, and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s an issue with a par­tic­u­lar snap­shot of WebKit, or some­thing Google did in imple­ment­ing their custom Javascript engine V8. Either way, that sucks.

Top 1 Web Navigation Design Tips: Don’t use Flash for Navigation

People love lists. They never want to read an arti­cle about how to actu­ally do any­thing: They want to read the 10 ways to do it. Or the 5 worst places to be when they’re doing it. Or the 3 most famous people that ever did what­ever it is they want to know about doing. Fine. I’ll play along.

Here’s the Top 1 Web Nav­i­ga­tion Design Tips: Don’t use Flash for navigation.

See what hap­pened here?

I just wanted to open New Balance’s “Where to Buy” link in a new tab. But what do I get instead? The Flash right-​click menu. And it’s not even as though the link does some­thing inside the flash movie: it takes me to an entirely dif­fer­ent page on the site! So why can’t I open it in a new tab? Because - and this is me guess­ing - they really loved moving the words I was trying to click on 5 pixels to the right.

But look: I’m not some anti-Flash curmudgeon! I love Youtube as much as the next guy. Hell, I’ve done my time build­ing Flash sites. Some of the nifty stuff Chad and I were doing 8 years ago still isn’t common prac­tice today. So believe me when I tell you: there’s a time and a place for Flash. This just isn’t it.

So here’s the deal, my designer friends: I’m not buying your shit when you inter­fere with using the browser the way it’s meant to be used. I’m done putting up with your bogus non-​standard nav­i­ga­tion. You’ve lost my busi­ness. How hard can it be to remem­ber one rule?