Ask HN: Should we accept the “floppy disk icon” as the default save symbol? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should we accept the “floppy disk icon” as the default save symbol?

24 pointsacadapter40 comments

People have been making efforts to remove or replace the usage of the floppy disk icon as the symbol for "Save", as floppy disks aren't in everyday usage anymore.

However, could efforts like these be considered a waste of time?

Consider the ampersand symbol "&", which is recognizable to many people who don't know the French word "et". The main reason is its continuity.

Should we, from a cultural perspective, recognize the value of continuity in cases like these, instead of chasing design trends, and keep the floppy disk symbol?

View on HN

>Consider the ampersand symbol "&", which is recognizable to many people who don't know the French word "et".

Which - to nitpick - is actually Latin and pre-dates French by several centuries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand

it has a tradition in English as well, where it has actually more use than in other Latin derived languages, and actually the "ampersand" in English comes from a corruption of "and per se and", losing its original connection to "et".

In Italian the character is called "e commerciale" and in practice it is only used in the (anglo derived) names of firms (besides of course programming), in French it is esperluette, in Spanish it is called directly "et" (or Y comercial) in German it keeps the original relation with "et" as Et-zeichen (also Und-zeichen).

It is a very good example, as it is a symbol that originated in Latin, but which meaning was slightly changed by English and actually remained in common use only there, and survived centuries to "land" as a common symbol in computer scripting and programming.

About the floppy disk icon, it is IMHO a higly debatable one, like the (manilla) folder of the type used in vertical file cabinets, now that these are either completely extinct or only survive in a small number of offices.

I.e. the symbols were created in times where the object represented were extremely common, and as such were a good exemplification of a concept, but think also at the icon Winzip or similar use for compressed archives, a file cabinet inside a (compressing) C-clamp (in times when old-style metal clamps have become rare) compared to the (senseless) one where the symbol is a rectangle with a partially opened zipper.

So, personally I struggle to imagine symbols that could replace them "universally", i.e. there is the risk that any developer/designer would start using different images, creating a modern Tower of Babel.

We should keep it. The benefit from switching is miniscule, and the value lost in continuity and recognizability is massive.

I'm tired of designers chasing fads.

Imagine if those "designers" suddenly got interested in the Chinese language.

- "Hey, why is the character for 'sun' so boxy? The sun is round! Let's make the character a bit rounder! New Unicode position!"

- "Oh, but you forgot to remove the line in the middle, I need a new Unicode position for my variant!"

- "Wait! In my newly designed font, I just replaced the original one. What do I do with the two new Unicode characters? And should I keep the horizontal line in the middle?"

It only took about 1000 years for designers to stop mucking about around with Chinese characters. Hopefully by the year 3000 the save icon will also be cemented.

Ironically, there have been copious attempts at streamlining Chinese writing, the most successful attempt being simplified Chinese, so this isn't as strong a rebuttal as you'd think

Sure, but such attempts don't try to replace an ideogram because the object of daily life that inspired it is obsolete.

I agree. Also, what modern icon could be used to replace the floppy disk that would be immediately recognizable as meaning "save this file"? And if it represents a currently-used device, like a USB thumb drive, how long before that one becomes obsolete? And would we end up with each product having a different icon?

Piggy bank -- as long as there are coins.

Safe -- regarding obsoletion: probably a safe bet compared to a piggy bank (pun intended)

Some could argue that even USB sticks are pretty obsolete. Most mere mortals don't really use them anymore, and the only time I use them at home is when I need to boot off an installation .iso or something. They are rarely, if ever, part of my work day.

I looked around at my desktop, and GNU Octave has some "folded arror into top of computer" instead of the floppy. Way worse and totally random.

Notepad++, MS Office and Emacs has the floppy.

As long as you need one, you might as well use the same one. It's arbitrary, but it will always be arbitrary. Icons almost always are, except in rare circumstances where you get lucky.

But as much as possible you should avoid needing one. Saving is an artifact of limited storage and processing. You should instead design a workflow that eliminates the need for saving things. One way is to have a persistent undo stack that is constantly saving -- which has the nice benefit of also being continuously undoable, offers change tracking, and other benefits.

Don't worry about the outdated icon. Worry that the outdated icon represents outdated thinking about what computers are capable of. Computers have changed a lot since the days when we used floppy disks. Use that to your advantage, and get a better product.

Yes. I don’t pull out a magnifying glass when I’m looking for my lost keys, but I know instantly what that icon means when it appears on a screen. As for floppies, it seems the new generation typically has no idea what they are, but they quickly identify it as “the save icon.”

I'm of the strong opinion, that we should use the actual word "Save" whenever the space constraints allow us to do so.

I've spent countless hours explaining to my grandparents that the dustbin icon actually means "delete", and if you want to share a picture, you press the button with the three node graph.

Using a word like "Save" in place of an icon could be problematic when translating into another language in which it was a much longer word.

It happens all the time. It’s not a novel problem. And designers sometimes need to design keeping in mind the localization needs.

Then it should be considered by designer.

The word "save" itself is also a bit of a convention that we have had to learn culturally. What does it mean really in this context when you think about it? Save it for later? Save it from the void (temporarily)?

Do they think they store it in the bin or something?

Yes. The floppy disk is an excellent icon, and it's history is distinct, important and easy to convey.

Two other icons I could think of without effort are the telephone icon and the camera icon.

Same with the "folders" icon. I bet a very large percentage of the population has never used an actual paper folder.

yes. We should make a page showing all these icons along with pictures of their physical objects and a description of how they worked and what they were used for :)

I’m curious why this is given any thought at all, this seems of trivial importance. Is there nothing else to focus on?

Icons should make sense, otherwise, why have them? Many people using computers today have never seen a floppy disk and probably never will.

I mean fair enough if that's what one wants to spend their time on, but imo, nobody will notice.

Did we ever need a save symbol?

I’ve used computers with GUIs for 30 years, and I can’t remember seeing it on many applications at all apart from pre-ribbon Microsoft Office. And now that the trend goes towards everything you do being implicitly saved when you do it, the need for a button with an icon is even smaller.

Yes

The icons are as important as the keyboard shortcuts and menu items

It costs nothing (except a few pixels) to put a visual reminder on screen of something you "should do" frequently

I've watched people only ever copy/paste via right-click

Others via the buttons at the top of the window

Others via the Edit menu

And others using the keyboard shortcuts

Why make a product less usable to some people just because you know a different way to accomplish the same end-goal?

A few pixels is a very big cost when all you have is 640x480 of them. UI clutter affects usability too.

I’ll grant that while Microsoft Office is the only place I can remember seeing save buttons over all those years, for most people throughout the 90s and 00s, Microsoft Office was all they ever used. It might as well have been synonymous with software to them.

I suppose there was a window of time when screens were large enough to support gratuitous toolbars, but before autosave had become the norm, where it may have made sense. But now I’d go as far as to say requiring users to click a button or lose their work to be an anti-pattern.

I've seen save buttons in pretty much every application I've used that creates some kind of digital artifact stretching across multiple platforms (HPUX, Macintosh, Windows, various flavors of Linux) across the last close to forty years (first computer I remember seeing them on was a Mac 512K in ~1986 in MacWrite and MacDraw)

No one said you are "requiring users to click a button" - it's an affordance to end users indicating more possible actions are available (and, probably, "good")

Just like no one said you have to go to File->Save

Or press [cmd]-[s] (or [ctrl]-[s] if you're not on a Mac)

Sure - if you happen to enforce autosave, it's probably OK to remove the save button: but not everyone wants everything to autosave (probably more often than not, I expressly DO NOT WANT any changes I've made (visually or otherwise) to be expressed into the underlying file)

I was thinking back to MacWrite and other Claris programs when I wrote my original comment. I just can’t remember any of them having any save buttons in their toolbars, and I can’t find any screenshots where they have them. I can only remember saving using ⌘-S or the File menu. Maybe they had save buttons in certain markets to make Windows users feel more at home?

HyperCard of course didn’t have explicit saving at all, maybe that’s why I like that pattern so much today. Too bad it didn’t have the deep undo stack that modern applications have.

Edit: it looks like ClarisWorks 5.0 may have introduced the button in the form of an arrow pointing into a folder, but that was a pretty late addition, and it doesn’t support the universality of the floppy as a save icon: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1821-clarisworks-5-0-wit...

Rather than change the icon for saving, there are good reasons to think that there should be no save button at all and saving should be automatically done continuously.

Many softwares do that already, computers have the resources to make it seamless, and it just makes sense in most cases.

> People

What "people'? Who are these "people"?

> Consider the ampersand symbol "&", which is recognizable to many people who don't know the French word "et"

"et" is a lot older than French, my friend - it's from Latin

Use, do not use, doesn't matter. Just always provide word label, not only icon.

What alternative would you propose?

The suggestion was to avoid chasing alternatives

And that's a moronic "suggestion"

Why remove something obvious when it's cost-free (minus a few pixels) to offer another way to get to the same result?

We should kill the save feature. This is not a new idea.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.o...

"Should we accept?" ... How old are you?

It's been the symbol literally since forever. There's nothing to accept.

And who is this "we" you speak of?

What kind of Narcissistic perspective is this?

I think I have never seen a floppy symbol while using my android phones. Also not available in many interface icon collections, like Google Material Icons etc. when I recently wanted to have buttons with icons in an ImGui project.

Many kids growing up with computers today have probably never seen a floppy disk as an icon, web interfaces usually use 'Save Changes' as text. Even desktop tools like Blender don't use it these days. Krita still does, as an example.

Yes, we should.

Yes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com