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by ninkendo 835 days ago
I dream of a parallel universe where browsers took the lead in crafting innovative UI’s for standard web forms, with things like password prompts behaving intelligently, dropdowns supporting advanced autocomplete, excellent date pickers, caps lock reminders on password dialogs, etc etc.

Websites could have been simple to make with basic markup, leaving UX niceties to the browser vendors.

The world we live in is about as far from that as you get, with the stock UI for <input> elements being about par for 1992 UI toolkits, if even that.

2 comments

The mobile platforms were a chance to reboot that part, and have browser do a lot more UI wise with custom handling of the different data types (dates, passwords, phone numbers, ranges etc.)

It just didn't pan out to tablets and desktop computers. But it might not be too late ?

> It just didn't pan out to tablets and desktop computers. But it might not be too late ?

Safari has a caps lock indicator on password fields on every platform, and has had it for several years - at least since Safari 12 on macOS 10.12 (circa 2018), possibly longer, but I don't have an older VM to test on.

Gecko has an open feature request for this, from 2 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1757348

Chromium has an open feature request for this, from 3.5 years ago: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40722752

In particular, the input select multiple is atrocious with default styling.