Ease up on the browser control

[Boden Larson, modifié il y a 15 années.]

The following items have really been irritating me:

1) (Firefox 3 and IE7) Go to a Liferay message board and do a search for something. From the search results, click the back button in your browser to return to the page you did the search from. Notice that the "Search" button is now broken. Forcing page refresh doesn't clear it.

2) When posting a reply in a Liferay message board, it is possible to start typing your message before the page fully loads. Near the end of the page load, your cursor will be "javascripted" to the Subject field, interrupting whatever you were typing. There is no reason in a case like this to move the cursor to any field for the user. It's one of those things that might work in a regular application, but not in the browser. (Liferay isn't the only one guilty of this)

3) Trying to hijack Copy/Paste control from the browser is a bad idea and frustrating for the user. I have to use keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste in the WYSIWYG editor used by Liferay because Firefox doesn't allow access to the clipboard and the right-click context menu has been hijacked. Very annoying. It's also troublesome to copy WebDAV URLs for much the same reason. Just let text boxes be text boxes and let my browser handle cutting and pasting. People already know how this works on the web and it's confusing when things don't work the way we're used to.

If something isn't specifically helpful, then consider not doing it. The cool factor will always get its butt kicked by the annoyance factor when a feature stops working because of something as simple as a browser update -- especially when the feature wasn't very helpful in the first place.

[Lisa Simpson, modifié il y a 14 années.]

There's been a lot of stuff lately that's not worked very well - the uploaders for the documents, files, an dimages being the most notable.

[Nate Cavanaugh, modifié il y a 14 années.]

@Boden:

Thanks for finding these as well as posting them. Would you mind creating bug tickets for them at http://issues.liferay.com ?

1. I hadn't seen this bug before, but I'm glad you posted it. It's certainly quite annoying and I'm confident we can find a fix for it.

2. I agree this one can be quite annoying. We've already implemented somewhat of a fix in the login form, but with enough feedback, I would definitely consider removing the functionality.
The feature isn't added for "cool" factor, but more or less as a hint of where to get started, and the problem is being able to accurately guess when the user as interacted with the page, and not focusing the field for them.
The only one I've heard a major complaint about is the message boards, which actually relates to a separate issue of the editor taking a while to load.
But I've definitely considered removing it altogether, or keeping the functionality, and allowing it to be an opt in for portlet developers.

3. I don't believe we mess with the browser copy/paste in any of our own applications, however, I do know that FCKEditor does try to access this data.
WebDAV resource boxes simply autoselect all the text on focus, and this is simply to not require the user to have to select a long string of text, when the only reason you'd be focusing the box is to select it.
But it should not be messing with your clipboard in any way, so if you find anything like that, if you could bring it to our attention, it would be incredibly helpful.
As far as the editor, it is possible to either change the WYSIWYG editor or remove it entirely, and as you say "let a text box be a text box", and I don't believe all of the editors exhibit this functionality.

There are some ways to get around these annoyances that you could add on a per theme basis or a per page basis, but the one regarding FCKEditor is more editor specific so the only real way to get around that is with a different editor.

Thanks again for posting this and I hope this helps answer some of your concerns.

@Lisa Simpson:
I'm aware of a few issues with the document uploader (which is the same one used in document library, and image gallery) and we're looking into a few alternatives (I also saw that you posted a few alternatives on one of the tickets, so thank you for that).

If you have any other specific issues if you could file a ticket for each of them, it would be incredibly helpful for us, and we'd be able to address them quicker.

Thank you guys for caring enough to post. Your help is much appreciated,