Please. Fix. That.

Google: Search For What I Asked For

Google has adopted an annoying habit of changing what I have asked to search for with something similar but different to what I want. Perhaps this doesn't affect you, but for a software developer, it happens all too often.

Here's a recent example. I search Google for the phrase: "document insertImage" (without quotes). Google then goes and uses an algorithm of some kind to see what I really meant to search for. It determines that what I probably meant to search for was "document insert Image" (without quotes). Which is not what I wanted. Google explains this to me on the results page: "Here are the results for 'document insert Image' ... Search instead for 'document insertImage'", giving me the opportunity to correct their mistake.

But what I really want is for Google to search for what I asked for to begin with. Inevitably when this happens, I wind up scanning the list of the results and about half-way down the page I realize that none of these results are useful because Google didn't search for what I asked for.

I know Google does this to be helpful — a lot of people write searches with typos and this is Google's way of improving the search experience for most of their users. But for people like me that are pretty good at typing and need to search for programming phrases ("insertImage"), it just gets in the way. I would love a preference for disabling this feature altogether. I'd also settle for Google just doing the requested search and including a block at the top suggesting their alternative search if one is found relevant.

Google, please fix that.

Apple Developer Login: Stop preventing paste

UPDATE: Apple has changed their login form quite a bit and it no longer prevents pasting into the password field. But, other sites out there still employ this tactic for some reason. So to counter that, you can install a Safari browser extension that fixes it for them too.

When you go to sign in to the Apple Developer web site, and navigate to login. You get this little innocuous login form. But unlike most login forms on the web, this one hates you. It won't let you paste anything into the password field. Some developer at Apple, in their infinite wisdom has decided to prevent such a thing.

You can see in the screenshot here taken from the HTML source for the page, they capture and prevent the "onpaste" event (and needlessly blocks cut and copy, which the browser already prevents) for that field.

I'm at a loss as to why they do this. Is there a security benefit I'm missing? If so, why does NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD do this? I'm sorry, but some of my passwords are lengthy and generated and I can't remember them. So, I often copy the value from my password management tool (1Password) and paste it into the password field. Except here, I cannot¹. Is Apple trying to encourage short, memorable passwords that can be typed easily? Are they trying to discourage the user from copying passwords to the system clipboard? Cause they didn't prevent that; they prevented populating the value already on the clipboard into the password field. And that's not helping anybody.

Please fix that.

 

¹ YES. I realize the 1Password Safari extension can be used to populate the fields properly, but that still doesn't excuse breaking the expected and accepted behavior of a simple login form.