Inconsistent user experience with excluded websites, iframes, tabs and extensions.

[Assaf Lavie]

Hi all,

Just started with vimium and I'm completely in love with it. I did however encounter some frustration right away and I want to share these issues with you with you and help figure out solutions.

I'm sorry if any of these issues has already been discussed. I do feel, though, that putting them all in one place under the banner of UX consistency could be useful:

1. Excluded sites, which tend to be sites that have their own keyboard bindings, "break the spell" and take you out of Vimium and into underlying-KB-shortcut-land. For example, when you iterate over tabs, e.g. K to go right, you'll get "trapped" by any excluded site tab along the way. So as long as there's a gmail open somewhere, I basically cannot rely on K,J.
2. New tabs are a source of frustration. Hit 't' by accident, now you cannot 'x' out of it. This constantly yanks me out of "vimium mode".
3. Vimium doesn't apply to other extensions - only to pages themselves. So any form-filling with LastPass, for example, is out of the question. Which means almost every login screen breaks the spell.
4. Links inside iframes do not get highlighted, and those are extremely common these days, especially in commenting systems, social buttons, etc.
5. Certain dynamically created DOM content is ignored when it comes to link highlighting, like Facebook's notification popup menu.

Consistency is key for good UX. I'm trying to think what could be done to address these issues, and I'm wondering if there are any effort already ongoing that I could contribute to as a developer/ux guy. 

As far as solutions go, off the top of my head I can think of a few ideas, but I want to clarify I'm not trying to push any agenda, just trying to help a discussion emerge:

• Are there any plans to develop features that automate Chrome's chrome, not just pages? i.e. at the very least other extensions, menus? 
  
• Has thought been given to the idea of allowing partial exclusion of websites? e.g. let certain cross-tab navigation shortcuts still be in effect, while all the inner-page navigation shortcuts are turned off.
  
• In the past I've developed something very similar to link highlighting which works on the OS level using screen capture and OpenCV (computer vision) - it highlighted anything that "looks like" it's a clickable thing and gave it a shortcut, much like vimium does. Would that be something to consider for the future of vimium, or is it completely out of scope? I'd be happy to donate that code, btw. It is native, but cross platform.
  

A bit long, sorry. Thank you all, btw, for this incredible extension. 

Assaf Lavie

[Phil Crosby]

Hey Assaf, this is a great summary -- thanks for bringing all of these thoughts together. I think a lot about the consistency of Vimium and all of the places the Vim abstraction breaks irk me to no end. In response to some of your observatiosn:

1. I think what we want here is partial keyboard overlays, where vimium intercepts some keys but not others. There is an open ticket on the issue tracker and this will get some thinking and advancement int he coming weeks.

2. It's finally time for vimium to get a new tab page...

3. No plans for this, and it may be messy enough to be impractical to solve.

4. Yes, a long standing issue. I'd welcome some thought and/or a prototype. https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/602

5. I haven't seen this (although I don't use facebook much). Can you file a bug?

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[Assaf Lavie]

Hey Phil,

>> 1. I think what we want here is partial keyboard overlays, where vimium intercepts some keys but not others. There is an open ticket on the issue tracker and this will get some thinking and advancement int he coming weeks.

This could be as simple as adding an optional white list configuration per excluded URL. e.g. http://*.reddit.com, "HLtx" means those specific shortcuts would still work on reddit. Couldn't it?

>> 2. It's finally time for vimium to get a new tab page..

Hear hear. Or just allow users to configure any URL they want to be opened when "t" is hit.

>> 4. Yes, a long standing issue. I'd welcome some thought and/or a prototype. https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/602

I'll definitely look into it.

About 5: I must admit I can't recreate it any more. Weird. I'll open a bug if it does.

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