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Comment by exitb | Hacker News Reader

Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?

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> Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link?

Yes.

> Do you ever get confused navigating this website?

No, because I've been browsing the web for a while and know that every website does things their own way.

Given it’s a website mostly for experienced computer people who, like you, don’t really need those visual cues, don’t you think adding them would be superfluous?

No.

It's a website for experienced computer people, and I appreciate its minimalist aesthetic, but that doesn't mean there's not enormous room for improvement.

I have recently discovered a config option "Underline all links" in Firefox, and it's really nice, actually.

Thanks! Settings > General > Browsing > Always underline links

(or in about:config set layout.css.always_underline_links true )

It's visually noisy tbh, but I'd recommend to stick with it for a few days and see if you can get used to it. It took me about two days. So nice to see where the "buttons" are.

It also works on Firefox for Android through about:config, which is ostensibly unavailable, but not really: chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml - from there, you can also re-enable about:config by toggling general.aboutConfig.enable

Interesting. Chrome doesn't have this option, but if you have stylebot or other extension it's easy to add a global CSS rule that adds it. I'll try it out for a while and see how it goes.

Now that you've said it, I think PG would have designed a better site if he didn't hide the underlines.

But also, it wouldn't get any worse if the same design was kept and the underlines were enabled. And it would improve the usability for first-time users, but the nature of HN is that those are always very few.

Wouldn't hurt if interactive elements didn't require me to zoom in order to interact with them on mobile.

I live in regular fear that my fingertip will hit the wrong up/down icon.

I do it all the time and sometimes I notice and unflag an article. But often not.

I find accidental flags rarer due to the layout versus things I'm trying to tap, however the few times it's happened I only discovered it days or months later when visiting the "flagged" page [0].

Still, there's a kind of guilt, like realizing you unknowingly kicked a puppy who isn't there anymore.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged

I often forget you can click on the timestamp. In fact for years I didn't know how to flag comments because of this.

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