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by spiffytech 1373 days ago
Years back, every web browser's built-in password manager locked up the page when submitting a login form, waiting for the user to answer "do you want to save this password?" before proceeding.

I thought that was silly: how do I know if I want to save the password before I've seen whether it's correct? Which I can't see until the form is submitted.

At the time I was using Opera, so I wrote in to their customer support suggesting that the prompt appear after the new page loaded. I never heard back, but a couple months later their next major release implemented exactly that behavior. A few months after that, every other browser followed suit.

I can't have been the only one bothered by the existing behavior, but given how long browsers had worked that way before I wrote in, I like to tell myself that the timing wasn't a coincidence, and that my little suggestion rippled out into a change that made a small thing better for the whole world :)

13 comments

I found a bug in firefox where the two letters of the weekdays appeared as 3 letters for portuguese (pt-PT). Eventually found that it was an error in the unicode standard, so submited the proposal for change. Probably there's dozen of people involved in this... but seeing it being changed brought me great joy.

I was a tiny part in changing a tiny mostly irrelevant detail that was causing a slight inconvenience to millions of people daily. Improving humanity one bit at a time...

Do you happen to have a link to the proposal I can see and share with a class? I'm teaching a few lectures about some "weird" stuff this semester, and this would be a great example.
FWIW searching https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ for "magic" finds a bunch of posts that might also fit with that topic.

(The rest of the posts are an interesting rabbithole if you're not aware, apologies in advance)

I ran into a problem formatting numbers in the Italian locale back in 2014: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/langpack-locales/+...

It turned out to be a low-level bug in glibc: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10797

It got fixed five years later, long after I had worked around it and left the job where I found the bug.

Well, that's going to be a very cool class I best !
This is great! Imagine how many people had no idea how to get something like that fixed yet noticed the bug.
Opera was the most innovative web browser ever. They brought so many new things to the world of web browsing. Tabbed-browsing, mouse gestures, colored tabs, browser themes, in-built security integration with anti-virus software, an extensible browser - so many wonderful innovative features. It was a paid software initially, but then they made it free for everyone. I used to use it as my default browser, maybe 13-15 years ago.
Something I really miss from Opera is that the content of every page you visited was saved and stored for search! This helped me so often to find pages that I had visited, and remembered a few words from, but didn't bookmark or save otherwise. No idea why browsers today did not copy this feature.
Web browsers are strange. They are sophisticated pieces of engineering, but they refuse to implement the lowest hanging fruit features UX wise.
A cynical take is that they purposely hold back bookmarks/offline-search so that you use their web search engine instead.
They are built by people who are excited about the web, so it sort of makes sense that anything off the critical path of: “make websites and web applications great” would be deemed less important. Why make local search when there is a web application called Google?

Ferraris probably aren’t know for having sufficient cup holders.

What an amazing idea! I would love to have that feature.
Spatial navigation is a feature I really do miss. I don't think any other browser supports this. It made keyboard-based browsing possible without resorting to stuff like hit-a-hint. You could just hit Shift+Arrow Key (which I mapped to the home row) and select a the nearest link (or anything interactive) in that direction. I think it worked in a visual fashion so order in the DOM didn't matter at all. It behaves exactly like one would expect.
The Opera CTO is now building Vivaldi, which is basically Opera. It has all the features I remember (spatial navigation, mail/RSS client, gestures, split tabs, etc) and is very good.
Are you sure tabbed browsing was Opera? I mean, Mozilla browser (predating Firefox) had it in 1998.
Wikipedia lists Opera v4 having tabs in 2000, while they were added to Mozilla 0.9.5 in 2001: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)
Mozilla had multiple documents first, by just following Windows' MDI standard.

Then Netscape and IE got into a war for mindshare, and part of that was to ignore MDI and splash their browser windows all over the taskbar instead, to be more visible and grab more user attention.

Tabbed browsing was never a new invention, it was just a re-implementation of what we already had by way of MDI.

IIRC it was InternetWorks by BookLink Technologies

According to: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/which-browser-invented-tabs-3-...

Opera also had tab groups, MRU tab switching, and saved sessions. Those exist in some form or fashion now, but the implementations are not as smooth.
Text reflow on mobile browsers. I still miss that feature and much prefer that with desktop mode vs crappy mobile mode sites.
"Reading mode" is still very much a feature of mobile Chrome and Firefox, and almost a neccessity.
its my default browser now. It still great!
Well, I used to love Opera as well, it was my first "serious" browser as I became a netizen. But now I wouldn't even dare to try it as it's owned by a consortium of Chinese investors, rather than a Norwegian company.
Vivaldi is pretty good and though it's based on chromium, is the new opera in spirit.
No coincience. Vivaldi is co-founded by ex-CEO and co-founder of Opera.

I quit using Opera after he did not keep his promise to swim across the Atlantic in 2005: https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi...

> I quit using Opera after he did not keep his promise to swim across the Atlantic in 2005: https://www.zdnet.com/article/opera-boss-starts-atlantic-swi...

Congratulations. This is the most persnickety HN comment I've read. And I've been here more than a decade.

I might try Vivaldi out after your comment and because of their completely sarcastic pricing section on the download page.

Genius.

Built in email and rss feeds are really nice as is the calendar base history page.
And now we’ve come full-circle as 1Password 8 requires you to save your password prior to submitting the form instead of offering to save it after submission. Which is a huge regression as it results in this exact issue all over again.

https://support.1password.com/save-fill-passwords/

Sadly, 1Password seems to just get worse and worse in terms of usability with each release. The latest incarnation has so many little annoyances that makes me seriously consider switching. The one thing it's got going for it that really is kind of a killer feature for me is SSH key handling. It's super nice being able to sign your commits with Touch ID. Everything else is meh at best.
It's truly baffling how they manage to consistently make the software worse every single release. I was a huge fan of 1Password many years ago (and have been happy to pay for it throughout), but each successive release is more confusing and less reliable.
Bitwarden is by no means perfect but I really appreciate their user engagement and excellent documentation.
How is it not perfect? I haven't noticed a flaw yet.
The UI isn't all that intuitive, the 'ask to save'/'ask to update' prompts don't work that well, but I don't really blame them because they are injecting into the DOM which usually changes. As someone else mentioned, it's a bit slow to sync and load sometimes. I wish it was more obvious when I have an existing session with the desktop app which can send a token to the browser extension to keep it loaded.

You can tell i'm really reaching for bad things to say about it, haha

Agreed. Especially on iOS has it become obtrusive. Form inputs being obscured by mini pop-ups. I could go on.

I’m waiting for the release of the new macOS and I’m going to evaluate using the native implementation and ditching 1P.

The promlem with using apple password management on macos is that I need vertical tabs. Only vivaldi and Firefox provide them now and they don't use the macos key chain
What do you mean by vertical tabs?
I think you can sign git commits with a yubikey [1]. I haven’t done it myself; I use Apple’s keychain for my ssh keys.

[1] https://nuculabs.dev/2018/06/30/how-to-sign-git-commits-with...

everybody seems to be complaining about the latest release, but i find it just fine. what's wrong with it?
Any person/company/thing that uses 1Password needs to take a look around. Bitwarden is where it is at.
I love Bitwarden, but I don't understand why it takes 10 seconds to search a database with 100 entries (Android app, when searching for a saved password). It's aggravating.
Something's wrong as I have many hundreds of passwords and have no noticeable lag searching them.
I just did a whole test because I missed the fact that you said 1Password 8. I'm still on 1Password 7: https://imgur.com/a/WpeffJE
They may have come full circle but I certainly haven’t.
I discovered a bug in Java 1.0.1's GridBagLayout and posted about it to USENET. It was fixed in JDK 1.0.3.

I also emailed the GIMP maintainers about a bug in their select color region tool in GIMP 0.99.x that made it ignore 1-pixel-wide barriers. By 1.0 it was fixed.

I was chuffed when it happened, but the internet was a smaller, chummier place back then, so we expected that kind of response more than we do today, I think.

In a similar vein, I wrote to Microsoft suggesting their "Authenticator" TOTP app for Android would benefit from a search feature. I can't have been the only one, but it did make me happy when they actually implemented it a few months later
I also suggested it but their iOS app still does not have it. Really annoying with >20 totp tokens.
i still see this behavior in firefox. the save password popup disappears by the time the page is loaded. and it baffles me every time how that is supposed to be useful.
The stupid thing is that it already is async and not locking up like it was in the very old days op refers to. They were just so clever as to add a timeout after which that dialog closes, regardless of whether the page actually finished loading. So on a slower page you end up with the popup disappearing while the page is still (mostly) blank and you don't know yet whether the credentials were correct.

I think just clicking in a blank spot (or the text fields) in that dialog stops the timeout, but it's one of these things I'm not actually sure about and it's almost like a cargo cult kind of ritual...

I find that it usually sticks around long enough. But I agree that it should stay open at least until I interact with something else.

On the bright side it just collapses into a "key" icon in the URL bar that you can click to open it back up and save the password.

> On the bright side it just collapses into a "key" icon in the URL bar that you can click to open it back up and save the password.

I've been using Firefox as my main browser since 2010 and I never realized this.

It’s like that Teams pop up that informs you that a colleague started a meeting, the one that always disappears after you finish typing your sentence and start to move your mouse towards it.
you can click it right away, finish your sentence, then click again to join the meeting once you're done :]
Ha! Great tip indeed!
The most amusing (for me) behaviour is what OR I need to press Csncel everytime ( my preffered bahaviour, honestly, I don't save passwords) OR never see the dialog again (I'm totally okay with saving the pass for some LAN devices which would be never acessible from the net ever - but I can't)
I submit suggestions, features, bugs, detailed reports, new use cases etc. I'm more than happy to write detailed submissions, or do some traces when there's a bug.

But if I notice there's no feedback or implementation within a reasonable period of time, I will stop doing that ever again for that company (large, small, doesn't matter).

I refuse to waste my energy on that kind of process.

Every few years I get an automated email from Wordpress where someone finally fixed a bug I submitted over a decade ago, lol
If only Roku and Android TV boxes had a way to display pdf's on the TV!

Hint hint hint!!!

After all, they can display movies, pictures, and music. PDFs, please! I'd even pay for it.

I usually cast them from my ipad to the tv.

My ipad may be a very expensive PDF reader but it's bloody good at it.

I understand it not working on a Roku but why couldn’t you use an android pdf reader?
I looked up the android tv box on Amazon. Doesn't support pdfs.
You could always open the pdf on your phone and cast your phone screen.
Yes, and I could hook up my laptop to the TV, too. But I bought the Roku box because it's so much more convenient than dinking around with the laptop.
This still sometimes happens on iOS Safari. I don’t know what is different about the pages where it happens, but it’s annoying.
Even MacOS Safari does this. I don't know whether the latest update fixed it though.
During the Edge beta in transition to Chromium engine, I requested they add green to the icon. I did get an automated thank you when it was finally released. That really made my day.
Oh, that's so cool! :-) Could you please write to Whatsapp or Telegram and ask them not to delete the EXIF information from shared images on their platform? I understand that they compress images so they don't take too long to transmit and load, but I think there's a big group of their users (especially for Whatsapp) that use their platform to share family pictures. For this purpose, having the EXIF date (if it's available) could be very handy, since the picture could be properly timestamped and archived without having to ask again to the original poster for the specific files.
I think the EXIF data is removed because, for the vast majority of people that don't think to remove it, it's a safety risk. Posting a picture of your house? Your kid arriving at their first day of school? Some other location you'd rather a bad person not have info on? Most people don't think to remove that data before posting (and sometimes post directly from their phone camera?)... removing that data removes a lot of risk for them. Leaving it in is only considered a small benefit to a smaller subset of people (comparatively)
We could always strip the location information (or any other identifying data like camera/phone model). But I can't see how having the date information attached to the image could be a safety risk. Especially when that information is already available within the app. The issue is that the app's UI is cumbersome to provide both pieces of information at the same time for a set of images.
Oh no this is a bad idea. There's a bunch of data (including location!) that is often included in EXIF.
I don't think is a bad idea at all. Just keep the timestamps if you want, and strip all the rest. But I feel that having the date attached to the image is a good idea. Is not technically complex nor bandwidth demanding and provides a very useful context to the picture.
As a general privacy rule I like stripping this by default. Couldn't you just zip up some images to retain this?
People would doxx the hell out of themselves without knowing it all the time if you did that.
you are literally one of my new fav people !