The New York Times: When features break normal behaviors
Feature Creep is a nightmare for many. Some features are useful and when it doesn’t push a project back and improves the experience then it’s okay to have them.
One day I was on The New York Times’ website and I highlighted some text to act as a marker while I replied to someone on messenger I noticed something. A small tool tip popped up with a question mark and as I hovered over it - it stated ‘Lookup Word’. Clicked the tool tip to have a small pop up window open with the definition. At first I thought it was something the web browser had done but then I noticed it happened in other browsers and realized that the developers for The New York Times’ had added this feature that when you highlighted some text you could get the definition of the word. - Pretty Useful.
But then I noticed something - When I right clicked the highlighted text, I couldn’t copy it because it undid the highlight and thus prevented me from copying the text.
This feature which seemed useful to me broke normal browsing behaviors - Now we have a problem. Without the feature I could of copied the text and searched for the definition myself - but now I can’t copy this text.
But Wait… You can copy with keyboard shortcuts..
Yes I can use keyboard shortcuts, but the problem with that is not everyone knows keyboard shortcuts - for example - do you know from right off your head what Command+Option+Control+8 on Mac OSX does?
What if I wanted to copy a whole paragraph? - Well that works. As soon as I highlight four words I’m able to copy the text. So it doesn’t break my normal behaviors all the time… only when I highlight three or less words, then I have to use the keyboard shortcuts..
Not a bash on The New York Times’ site - I thought it was useful and granted most of the time I will use the keyboard shortcuts but it is a risk to make such a move. From what I’ve noticed when it first was released a lot of people complained and even went as far as blocking the script using ad-block and I’m assuming that since it’s release it’s been adjusted. It would be nice if at some point they made it so I could still have my normal right click behavior but no one’s perfect and hopefully they will find a way to keep the feature because I do think that they were focusing on their readers when they added this feature.
