I think the change was very simple - we stopped bothering with middleground. "Power Users" were treated like "users, but a bit more", so we had 'users', 'power users', and 'developers'. All that happened is that we just accepted that power user can have the same access to tools as developers.
We didn't stop giving power users extra power. We gave power users more power.
I think overall the complaint is every type of experience. Including native apps. You can't simply dev tools inside of a native app. Even with Charles proxy or something you'd be grasping at straws trying to figure out what may be the actual issue (and at that point you probably can't work around it anyway)
So the options for power users are still here, but they just aren't front and center as they used to as you said. This reminds me a little bit of the discussion around the iphone not being customizable and the response being that you have the option to just get an android phone instead.
At some point in the spectrum here one must become lazy when they can't be bothered to click on a few things or find an alternate product, and you become entitled when you demand power user features to become front and center when the vast majority won't ever need to use the features.
I've always had the opinion that it's possible to have a middle ground. User friendly defaults, the ability to dig deeper and the ability to make advanced features more readily accessible. It's not easy though, picking one or the other is definitely a lot easier.
Prime example: Twitter always responds "oops, something went wrong" even if the backend returns `{ error: "Video aspect ration is not allowed. Try 16:9" }`
People's heads aren't going to explode if you treat them like functioning adults.
But why do bookmarklets run with the security context of the currently opened page? I have one self-written bookmarklet to capture the page title and url into emacs for storing it there. Firefox asks me every time I click on that bookmarklet on a new origin (domain, protocol tuple) whether I want to allow that. With no option to avoid that. I have written this piece of code myself I want to use it to enhance my workflow. There is no need to treat it like any javascript hosted on a CDN, or on a Facebook server.
My day job is C++ app and driver code for rather complex systems yet when I open browser dev tools my eyes glaze over. There is plenty of middle ground of people who are technical but are not web or browser developers.
There’s a lot to look at in there, but there’s some usual suspects tabs that people look at the majority of the time they have dev tools open. And conversely some tabs that you probably only use in the web dev scene. I’d highly recommend perusing the network and storage tabs, for things like status codes and cookies, respectively. As I mentioned, the vertical is nowhere near as high as you’re saying, you’ll figure it out if you look at it more.
I don't think we did. The trend in the past few years is to dumb down all tools, especially UI tools, to the lowest common denominator.
No, most software today is designed for the use case that you have never seen the software before. That is implicitly enforced by the way most companies do A/B testing. The experiments show a new part of the UI to an unsuspecting user without any upfront knowledge that they are part of an experiment. Therefore the variant that has the lowest hurdle for the most common case of the most common user is optimized. So it is basically ignored that people tend to learn how to use their tools.
Learning to learn your tools is even made harder by constantly changing UIs. Reading documentation, following tutorial, watching introduction videos is basically useless for a software that will change whenever a product manager needs to complete an increment for his KPIs.
I'm pretty sure A/B testing has become a cult whose rituals are often practiced in a way that leads people away from meaningful or productive outcomes.
Is there anywhere else you've found where people are talking about this (either from a perspective of how to do it better or what else to do instead)?
Yep, it's fun when you go to a site where you have a log in but it expired and have to search for the tiny 'sign in' button that's mostly covered by the sign up form.
I was trying to place an order, and it kept failing with a red banner stating "something went wrong" (I'm paraphrasing as I don't recall the exact verbage, but it was one of those completely worthless error messages)
Pop open dev tools ... the server is returning something about a graphql error.
Support had no idea what was wrong.
The problem ended up being that my saved credit card had expired. For fuck's sake, that is a user-actionable error; tell me what the problem is. At least tell me it was a payment problem, since that's probably all the payment processor told you.
After all if you have three API layers realizing in this situation the second layer isn't forwarding that error code because it erroneously thought it was one you hide behind a generic one is pretty common.
Opinion: I quite like the scroll, I think it comforting to see what the machine is doing. I think this is why sim city put a fake one in their loader(reticulating splines anyone). I wonder if the sim city messages tied into actual load events and could be used by the programmers to debug the loader. I think the later ones were random, but 2000 might of had an order to it.
The individual subsystems should be able to recognize their correct state and output a clear diagnostic when they are not in that state. I shouldn't have to step back through e.g. several broken services to find out my second ethernet port didn't initialize.
In other words, as a power user, I want to know if the site has a "You problem", and the only explanation I fully accept for why the modern web doesn't notify users about website errors is that it allows companies to save on QA costs.
I think we just have fight for poweruser options to be available via APIs and support the add-on ecosystem.
That's completely wrong.
1xx codes are all INFORMATIONAL (usually used for switching protocols).
2xx codes are all SUCCESS.
3xx codes are all REDIRECTs.
4xx codes are all CLIENT ERROR.
Only 5xx codes are SERVER ERROR.
1xx you do not care
2xx you are fine and do not care
3xx you are redirected and do not care
4xx crap, the client is wrong, you cannot do anything because the app is wrong
5xx crap, the server is wrong and you cannot do anything either.
"You hit a problem, it was reported to the devs, sorry. Try later" is the only reasonable message for normal users
1996 or 1997. I can't narrow it down further.
Shortly after that, they actively became hostile to power users. Just play with your dumb little consumer appliance like you're supposed to.
At second; it would likely mean many folks lacking in other skills, unbalancing what little we have in the society of work.
At third: include all the error detail you like, simply put it behind a "click here for more details" side door.
What?
The moment they(i mean we) started blocking ads I think.
I'm not just talking about ad supported sites, although I guess you could say that Google Drive is indirectly ad supported.
Since I do most of my ad blocking at the network layer rather than in my browser, it's not always obvious to me as the user whether it was a "my blocking broke the site" error or a "The site is broken" error.
I drive a car and only care about the speed, how far I can drive and to be warned that I have to stop if something is wrong.
I do not care about the temperature of the oil or water, about the tension on the thffr which powers the louhguh or why zgfnkvgv failed.
I know that if something goes wrong I will call the road assistance number.
If someone wants to learn more there is the hidden bus they can plug into, aka Dev Tools For Cars
It's not a big deal for a power user to hit F12 then click the network tab...
That’s pretty power user friendly.