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Comment by Joeboy | Hacker News Reader

Hijacking Ctrl+F or Ctrl+K are my two top peeves lately.

I'll add hijacking selection and Ctrl-C too.

It's very bad that browsers even allow overriding hotkeys. Like, I'm sure extra code had to be written to make this work on the browser side. It would've cost nothing to Google or Apple or Mozilla to not write that code.

Yes, this is yet another example of Browsers optimizing for apps rather than websites.

Ctrl+F hijacking, even if it provides a useful app search feature is something I despise. Browsers should have an alternate Shift+Ctrl+F or something that can be used in those cases. I just discovered Shift+Cmd+F that does something on Firefox.

That doesn't really help if the website removes the parts of the page that are outside the current screen from the DOM.

Don't do that either.

A prime example: JIRA's backlog view. In the self-hosted version, you could easily find the issue you were looking for in the backlog view by just using the browser's search, press Ctrl+F, write some words, you have the issue you were looking for. The cloud version Atlassian forced their users into, OTOH, features their own implementation hijacking Ctrl+F combined with dynamically removing the issues not currently visible from the DOM, to ensure that no-one can have the convenience of the browser's built-in search.

Outlook for web hijacks ctrl+r.

Don't fuck with the standard key combos.

Stop surprising users by taking away functionality from other applications.

Come to think of google docs spreadsheet thing does this too, and also F5. It also often fails to render correctly so I need to refresh the page.

This is why applications shouldn’t live on top of a browser on top of an OS GUI. That’s just restricting the workable UI conventions too much and makes for a confusing mess.

Honestly, this is one that I think can go both ways.

In Google Sheets on the Mac recently, Cmd-F for searching within the spreadsheet has stopped working—and while it's true that the way it worked was by hijacking that system shortcut, it didn't actually replace it with anything. So the only way to search was to go to the Sheets menu bar and find it in the menu.

And Alt+Left / Alt+Right

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