3
exerceo
137d

If Google finally made pull-to-refresh optional on Chrome for Android, it would be an admission of failure.

The failure to realize four years earlier that pull-to-refresh is potentially annoying to users, and the failure to listen to the abundant feedback by users who lost submissions or who interrupted playing media due to refreshing accidents.

One can assume that Google has something like a "user experience team". Didn't even one of these "highly qualified" people remotely consider that assigning the same finger movement to scrolling up and to refreshing could be a potential annoyance? Didn't this possibility go through at least one of their IQ 130 brains?

Now guess which is the more frequent purpose of swiping down. Scrolling up or refreshing a page?

Only one of the two is wanted at a time. Either scrolling up or refreshing. Assigning the same finger movement to two things at once is a downright terrible idea.

By making the pull-to-refresh anti-feature impossible to deactivate, Google effectively is begging its users to leave for Opera Mobile or Samsung Internet.

Comments
  • 2
    How about using sammy internet.

    Oh. You mentioned it right there haha. Well its a stepup in every way. Chrome also changes to not dektop mode everytime you switch website.. and it doesnt even have any tracker or ad protection built in.
  • 1
    Ok yeah this is a rant and it's good but it's like the 5th time you complain.
  • 1
    @c3r38r170 The last time I did not mention that a possible reason for Google's reluctance to introduce an option to turn the pull-to-refresh anti-feature off is public embarrassment.
  • 0
    @exerceo Fair enough.
  • 1
    How about backspace to go back that desktop browsers had up until relatively recently? What an awful design choice that was.

    If you were in the middle of filling out a form and for some reason lost focus of the field, you had to start all over if you tried to fix a typo.
  • 1
    @cuddlyogre wait what? In more than 20 years computer experience it never occurred to me that backspace does that.

    *checks web* oh apparently it was removed in Firefox 87 (2021). I never knew!
  • 1
    @saucyatom Believe it or not, there was a vocal group of crazies that demanded it stay that way. Thankfully, the browser vendors didn't listen to them.
  • 0
    @cuddlyogre Totally agreed, that backspace navigation was horrible. In Firefox, that could be disabled in about:config.

    browser.backspace_action
  • 0
    @cuddlyogre I knew it did but was never a problem for me. Not much of a conflict but not that practical either.
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