Applelust.com: What No Browser Ever Gets Right: Don't Freakin' Interrupt Me!

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What No Browser Ever Gets Right: Don't Freakin' Interrupt Me!

I have a serious issue with every single web browser out there: their utter lack of respect for what the user is doing at any given point.

What am I talking about? Here's the most common example. I'm typing into a text field in a browser. As I'm no touch-typist, I do have to look at the keyboard, or elsewhere—as is common with people using computers: when they start typing into a Word document, or a Quark text box, they do look away boldly, and when they turn back, they actually expect to find out that they're still using the same document or text box they had been. But with a browser, it's different: quite often, one returns looking at the screen only to find out that things have happened while one wasn't watching. No, it's not just pop-up ads: error messages, password dialog boxes, or just about any damn widget could have jumped up that the web and an application's arsenal of window types can offer, taking the focus, i.e. responding to the user's keystrokes that he or she directed at a completely different object.

"Focus" is a term in computing that describes the state of a user interface element that responds to your actions, mainly your keystrokes. If you type text, you always expect a specific control (a text field, a listbox, or perhaps a dialog box with buttons) to respond to your keystrokes. Focus is persistent between idle periods: if you stop typing for a while into a window, you expect that window to retain the focus, i.e. you expect it to still accept your typing when you resume it.

Focus does change during the use of an application. It usually changes when you click outside the text field you have been typing into, or when you close its window. Of course, there are many intricacies of the focus, but some concepts are well-understood and intuitive for most computer users. Yet web browsers seem to be somehow exempt from those conventions. But they shouldn't be.

How many times did you start typing into the URL field of a new window you just created, finding out only after typing out the entire URL that something had come between you and your URL field, forcibly (and silently) grabbing the focus? Maybe an error message popped up about some other procedure going on in another browser window. Or maybe some clever webmaster surprised you by making his or her web page jump to the front when fully loaded. Or maybe another web page, loading quietly in the background until now, suddenly came to its senses and popped up a message box asking for a password. In any case, your browser arbitrarily took away your focus without warning you, and you only find out after looking up after a while that you've been typing the best part of your very moving love letter into a URL field, or worse, at some newcomer of a window that simply ignored it.

Maybe that behavior seems normal to you, having gotten used to it, but it's definitely not the way software should work. Applications don't just arbitrarily change focus, period.

Would you like your word processor or e-mail client to start switching windows at will, so you'd never know for sure where you were typing (which one has the focus)? Or, talking of focus in a broader sense, would you keep using a movie player application that would gleefully interrupt the movie at a cliffhanger scene, only to let you know that it has completed the creation of some index file? I guess your answer is no to both questions. Why then do you accept similar behavior from a web browser? It's an application that may serve both as a productivity tool and as an entertainment device, and it shouldn't interrupt you in either quality!

Here's what I absolutely, positively expect and demand from any web browser out there: it should only take away my focus for a very, very good reason. When something happens that makes it impossible for me to keep doing what I've been doing. When my computer is scheduled to shut down, or in other extreme cases.

In any other case, it should respect the hell out of what I'm doing. Am I typing into a text field? Well, then that text field should be sacred. The browser should watch it extra carefully, as though it were a Quark document I'm editing. Just as Quark doesn't arbitrarily close my documents without saving, neither should my browser. Maybe it wants to reload and re-render my page? Well, it should then go out of its way to ensure that when it's done, my text field still has the focus, and all the contents it had typed into it before.

The way one uses a web browser for things like posting on message boards, uploading articles to content management systems, or writing web-based e-mails is no different from using dedicated word processors or e-mail clients. And those don't just change your focus, do they?

What's also sacred is your front window, the one you're using: browsing or typing into. Just as other applications never switch windows at will, browsers shouldn't either. Ever. Thus, offering to block any scripts that can change your focus (pop-ups or pop-unders and the like) is also a must. It simply cannot be tolerated when webmasters want to play with your focus. Of course, if you want to explicitly allow such behavior (for whatever masochistic reason), you should be free to set that preference too.

And generally, any change in focus should only be initiated by the user, e.g. by closing a window or tab, switching windows, or bringing up a print dialog. Yes, only users should be able to bring up dialogs too! Save dialogs, print dialogs, download dialogs, and so on. These don't just come up at will, when the app has a sudden idea: they are always initiated by user actions.

Web browsers (and sure, some other apps too) have a bad habit of putting up dialogs for whatever reason, taking away the focus. A web page in the background failed to load. Another one wants a password. There has been a connection failure. Bang! This all jumps right into your face. Maybe this behavior originates from the infancy of the web, when people were content with looking at text and pictures and clicking on these newfangled hyperlinks—and were mightily worried about their connection status, so they needed any information to fly right in their faces. But the web has grown up, it's a serious productivity and entertainment medium. And priorities have shifted.

Did a page in a window somewhere near the bottom of the stack fail to load? Okay. But does that directly affect whatever I'm doing at the moment? Hell no! Warn me with a sound, attach those messages to the window or tab panel they belong to, even list them all, clickably, in a dedicated floating error window where I can deal with each in due time—just don't bring them forward to hit me in the nose!

One great browser hopeful today is Apple and its Safari product. There are some promising signs: error messages are attached to the windows they pertain to, but alas, those windows are immediately moved forward along with their dialog sheets! Apple should take a few pages from its own books. Wasn't the purpose of dialog sheets the very freedom of users to get on with their business? If so, why not take it a step further and not annoy users unnecessarily? Apple could also go back to a celebrated OS 9 innovation: the Finder's small floating error windows that appear modestly in the background, sound a signal, and wait patiently to be discovered. That's what all non-crucial error messages should be like. And here's a hint: whatever is happening in a background window or tab probably ain't crucial right now. Otherwise, it would be in the front. Let the user decide about the focus.

- András Puiz

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