Updates occasionally do more harm than good.

In 2019, people got massively ripped off by a Google Chrome Android update.

They removed two essential features: First, the ability to deactivate pull-to-refresh. When I scrolled up and accidentally refreshed a page, I thought "Didn't I disable this s**t? No big deal, let's go to chrome://flags and… oh wait, where is it? Oh no, they wouldn't remove such an important thing, would they?".

Second, they got rid of the list view for tabs, which showed both page title and URL. Grid view only shows the title, there is only half the space for each title due to two tabs per row (four in horizontal view), and there are fewer items at once on screen.

This significantly damaged my trust in updates. Whenever I update, I expect everything that worked before to still work. The sad reality is that each update brings the risk of something being broken or taken away.

Image source: https://media.askvg.com/articles/... (what they removed)

Yeah it's annoying when features are removed but as developers I think all know that things have to go. Be it for the business or the application. The tab thing really annoys me too, but saying that that flag (which I think are even called experimental flags) getting removed is massively ripping people off is a bit of an exaggeration imho 😅

Designing your application in a way where the user can change the state of the page through you just passively navigating through it is borderline malicious design.

Backspace to go back is just as evil as swipe up to refresh. Scrollwheel to do seemingly everything on Linux is intensely frustrating.

Oh, just be careful.

Please, do share some of your perfection with the rest of the class.

@ScriptCoded Not that alone, but two essential options being removed that severly the browsing experience is a massive rip-off. But pull-to-refresh being mandatory is the worse of the two.

"things have to go" - Only bad things should "go". Good things must stay.

@exerceo good is subjective

I know it’s hard to accept losing favourite features but as @ScriptCoded says - anyone who’s worked on a product with a staggering amount of customization toggle options knows that there will be times where an old option that just 1% of users have changed, will be a massive blocker for a necessary refactor - or to be able to manage new options without getting bogged down.

I’ve even heard teams go ”if users are this upset about losing an old option - we’ll consider not giving them these options in the future, cause we can’t preserve everything forever”

Why not just use Firefox or any of the many forks of Chrome that are available on Android?

sammy internet wins on android anyways

@joewilliams007 Except it lacks proper page saving.

Its useless "reading list" feature saves pages in a locked-in directory which can not be backed up, so it dies along the phone.

Chrome for Android correctly saves pages as MHTML in the download folder.

Imagine a camera app which saves photos in a locked-in directory where they can never be moved out, so they are only accessible through that one app on that phone.

@ScriptCoded "good is subjective" - Accidentally refreshing the page while scrolling up and not being able to see the URL in the tab list is objectively disadvantageous.

@exerceo personally I'd much rather have it like that than using the button. And I practically never have issues with accidentally refreshing. So yes, it's subjective.

@ScriptCoded Then the option should remain. Many prefer pulling down to do one thing and one thing only: moving up the page. Nothing else.

@exerceo fatal exception: cannot resolve circular argument

No... it's far beyond "occasionally". Especially nowadays. Hell even doordash recently made a skillful, yet not well thought out, update which caused an apology and 10$ credit... it wasnt even something that bugged app or irl... just incredibly annoying and currently unchangeable...

They added auto translation dasher to customer's OS's locale settings. Ignoring the oddity of someone living in Michigan, frequent user for years (handicapped... so frequent) suddenly getting, honestly very well translated... too well at a glance, messages from a familiar app (which is in english, my OS is german) suddenly in apparently fluid german... and supposed to recognise it as the person picking up groceries... no warning/notice of the change

I thought it was amusing at first... 5x later i realised it had to stop or i need to find another solution cuz hyperfocus grinding me just parses it out since its unfamiliar and illogical... then hour later i wonder enough to check.
30min for a UI button max

@ScriptCoded so concise, so true.

Good, valuable, features nowadays include, suggesting(or even auto applying) filters to pics in real time, putting all your creds in other apps so thinking not required, anything that makes og microsoft Clippy seem like it shouldve tried harder to spam 'tips' and unrequested info... oh and the ability to get right to publicly solidifying your impulsive behaviour more instant... cuz thinking might result in not having public, duplicated, video evidence of your emotion(and/or drug) enduced poor, often illegal, decisions.

Society has made it this way... I made the mistake of assuming that I could find a basic managed network switch, in business/enterprise sections of networking.. sites, irl...somewhere ofc, right? ... nope. Apparently even if you need 64-128 port, rack-mounted, switches... you shouldn't need to know how to do basic network scripting or employ anyone who does...