This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by John Martin. Original Post: Why naked popup windows in web apps suck Feed Title: The Lone Programmer Feed URL: http://www.lonepixel.com/loneprog/javablogs-index.rdf Feed Description: Just another lazy programmer. (Java and UI Design channels only.) Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by John Martin Latest Posts From The Lone Programmer

For better or worse, the back and forward buttons, and the animated browser logo are fundamental parts of browsing the web, and I think it's a mistake for web applications to use JavaScript to remove them in popup windows. (Naked popup == popup window without menu or toolbars.)

There are two problems that I see. The first is simply the lack of a back button. If an application fails or takes the user to a dead page within the popup, then there is no way for the user to recover except close the window and retrace their steps. And that sucks if the page you were after is the result of choosing a whole bunch of form parameters. (You can usually use the browser's keyboard shortcut for navigating back, but I doubt this is known to most users, and is an unrealistic expectation anyway.)

The second problem is the missing animated browser logo. The information that this provides, ie that the browser is currently working on a request, is critical to the usability of web apps, which can have dramatically longer load times than static pages. The typical user response to a long page load with no feedback is to re-submit, which can be ugly to deal with in the application, apart from frustrating to the user.

I must admit that I have used naked popups in most of the web apps that I've written, mainly because they look better. I'm going to try and go cold turkey though. It probably means making slightly bigger popups, so that the menu and toolbars don't get all scrunched up or hidden, but I think it's probably better than pissing the user off.

One alternative that I don't so much mind is immediately refreshing the page to something that indicates the status of the request, like "Loading..." or "Fetching record...". MovableType does this on their Rebuild Site option. It's not bad, but still suffers from a missing back button. Mainly, I suspect, because navigating backwards on a site rebuild can cause problems, and they thought (as many developers do) that removing the back button will prevent this. As I said before though, the back button is not the only way to navigate backwards, so removing the button is helpful, but not sufficient.

That's my 2 cents (CAD) for the day.