Does Not Play Well with Others

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I am sick and tired of the Adobe Acrobat Reader taking over the web browser UI, so that simple, common commands no longer function as expected, if they function at all. For example, ctrl-N (which normally creates a new window) pops a “Go To Page” dialog; ctrl-P (which normally pops the print dialog to print the current page) does nothing whatsoever in Mozilla. There is no excuse for this. It is both a violation of common and consistent user expectations of what these commands do and a violation of universally consistent behavior — even across platforms.

Of course, you could consider this as really only a subset of the problem of plug-ins in general violating the user’s expectations. The Macromedia Shockwave/Flash plug-in steals control over the context menu, so that the menu is a Shockwave/Flash menu, not a web browser menu. Other plug-ins could be accused of similar sins against the user with ease.

Stop the madness! A plug-in is just that — a small applet that plugs into a larger application. The user does does not experience the plug-in as separate from the application into which it has been plugged — unless, of course, the plug-in is missing. Designers of plug-in interfaces should act like they’re guests in someone else’s home. They should not act like they own the place; they should abide by their host’s rules.

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