Clue: resizing browser windows == bad

[jducoeur]

Since this has happened to me twice in the past ten minutes, it's clearly worth a small LJ rant: opening up a new window and then resizing it to be Just The Right Size is *not* necessarily doing favors to your users.

Case #1: the Monster vs. Aliens movie website. Since this has a big glitzy Flash movie, it wanted the whole screen.

Case #2: the Adobe Downloader applet. This cute little Java thingy doesn't *need* much space, so it resizes the window to be Eeentsy-Weeentsy.

What do they have in common? Well, since I work in tab-based Firefox, they both resize MY MAIN BROWSER WINDOW. Never mind that the new page is only one of many tabs I have in that window, it wants to change the window to be the size *it* wants.

Bloody stupid anti-social webpages. Time for everybody to get the clue that we're living in a tab-based world now, and if you're not super-careful to make sure this is a separate popup window, you're going to just annoy a fair fraction of your users.

(Yes, there is probably a Firefox setting somewhere to prevent this from happening. There's a Firefox setting for *everything*. But I shouldn't have to go hunting for such a thing...)

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Agreement.

[dsrtao]

Ja. Also, I use sloppy-focus-follows-mouse. Resizing the browser window often means that you have just defocused yourself...

[mindways]

Particularly egregious when a tiny page resizes the window to be too small, so even something as small as it won't fit.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

That's the sort of thing that gets me growling like a possessive dog. "MY browser window! Hands off!"

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

(BTW, in case you haven't found it yet, you can disable it along with other annoying JS behavior in Prefs -> Content -> Javascript -> Advanced...)

[jducoeur]

I hadn't -- thanks...

[jducoeur]

There -- duly set. Thanks for the pointer to the setting: it's well-enough buried that the location hadn't occurred to me...

[cellio]

Yeah, I hate that too. It's arrogant -- the world obviously revolves around their web site. Hmpf.

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

Another special one is setting a pop-up window to exactly what they think the right size should be for their content, being wrong because they only tested on IE/didn't account for font settings/any number of other things and making it fixed size with no scrollbars. So you can't get to all the content, and sometimes can't do anything but close it because form controls are inaccessible.

You're not a desktop app, guys, no matter how much you want to pretend.

(And yes, there's a Firefox setting to deal with that, too, but it's still a pain.)