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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Or you can get rid of this uncharitable list altogether and replace it with something like 'with a mandate to balance complex trade-offs between technological constraints and competing user, web page, and web application designer needs'.

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You don't have to balance complex trade-offs if you make it a configuration setting.

Soooo many "Should we do A or B?" debates over software functionality are settled by "Do A but let the user change it to B in the Settings."

That's a trade-off. Choosing "Do A but let the user change it to B in the Settings" is very similar to "Choose A", because nobody changes settings. You just move the debate to what the default should be. Not to mention that "Should we or shouldn't we have crap-tons of settings?" is its own trade-off.

> That's a trade-off. Choosing "Do A but let the user change it to B in the Settings" is very similar to "Choose A", because nobody changes settings. You just move the debate to what the default should be.

Okay, smart-ass, what's your solution? Maybe we should put the GUI inside a box with the "A or B" decision delegated to a mechanism that monitors a radioactive source. We'll call it Schrodinger's GUI.

I wasn't being a smart-ass at all. I said "you have to balance trade-offs", you said "no, you don't have to, here's a non-trade-off solution", and I said "no, you've just changed the trade-off". Many people seem to think that moving things into configuration is a "free" solution, and I am very non-sarcastically saying that no, it is not. My solution is to be aware that there is no "solution", and you have to balance trade-offs (which is what I said to start!).

That's the thing though (I agree, it's not a nice list, but it's not nice to remove features either). Who says they have a mandate to do the balancing this way? It's their software to do with as they want. That's less mandate and more unilateral.

I wouldn't mind swapping a bit of a delay for a checkbox in the settings. I wouldn't even mind the checkbox being unticked by default.

Just to add there is a Checkbox in Settings (at least on the beta of Chrome) that overrides this behaviour --- it is in accessibility settings

I'm not convinced this makes things worse for any user. Can you think of a case?

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