Violent Opposition

Open the start menu and type "disk" into the search box. Move the mouse up and down over the right part of the start menu. The first found search result gets a flickering selection box.

Windows Explorer address bar: The "this path is too long to fit" breadcrumb (<<) and the "fancy way of showing a slash" breadcrumb (>) are not vertically aligned to each other. Morons.

Windows Explorer does not remember folder sort mode or view mode. Morons.

Everything based on Gecko or XUL seems to be more buggy than average (and that really says something). For example, Firefox for Windows can't even draw dotted rectangles properly. How about a straight line? That should be easy, right?

This is how a straight line looks in programs like Epiphany and Firefox:


No wonder there are over 50 000 unfixed bugs in bugzilla.mozilla.org when drawing a line is so hard. And a whopping 14 000 confirmed bugs that will never be fixed, ever.

The keyboard shortcuts for previous/next tab should be Ctrl+Left/Right Arrow for several good reasons. Gnome seems to have set a new standard under Linux, while Firefox has set a new standard for itself (which has bled into Opera).

Gnome uses Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown. Why is that a problem? First of all, we actually aren't going up and down, we are going sideways. Using Up to mean left and Down to mean right is like scrolling up and down in a document with the left and right arrow keys. Also it has a more serious problem, which we'll see later.

Firefox and everyone who wants to mimic the cool XUL guys (wow! it doesn't follow the desktop theme! now that's so über geek totally cool!) uses Alt+Left/Right arrow. At least they got the direction right. However, Alt+Anything should be reserved for keyboard accellerators (not the same as keyboard shortcuts) and the window manager. So the logical consequence of pressing Alt+Left Arrow is to move the entire window left, switch to the desktop to the left or similar. But this also has a more serious problem.

The serious problem: Keyboard shortcuts are called shortcuts for a reason. They should be quick. Neither the Alt nor the PageX shortcuts can be done comfortably with one hand. They can only be used with two hands.
The "correct" (in the sense that it was both first and sane) shortcut can be comfortably with either one or two hands.

Making keyboard shortcuts that starts with Alt (unless you're writing a GUI toolkit or a window manger) is just plain and simply ignorant. Those shortcuts are reserved.

Making keyboard shortcuts that can only be hit comfortably with two hands, when the exisiting, standard, sane, non-conflicting keyboard shortcut can be hit with either one or two hands is not only ignorant, but plain evil.

And one more thing: Hey you GTK developers! You should really implement Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab on tabbed panels.