I've come to understand how features like these get built, but I've also come to understand that people that use software are a lot more resilient and savvy than we think.
If 90% of your support tickets are about getting through a standard double-confirm, patio11 would probably recommend increasing your pricing to limit your paying customers to a pool that probably won't have much more trouble with that.
The people who end up calling support often aren't the ones paying the bill, for starters. That's definitely the case for Bluejeans and Zoom.
It also doesn't matter if you make a great FAQ page. Majority of dissatisfied people will never see it. Majorly because they won't call support but instead complain and grumble locally, the second biggest portion because once sent towards FAQ by support.... They won't follow it.
Only the tiny sliver of most dedicated will follow up long enough to reach the FAQ.
We’re talking software engineering phd can’t complete it without hand-holding hard (true story!)
So normal users definitely don’t understand nor manage to navigate the dialogs presented by the browser to produce a “successful” outcome.
In the past we used this mechanism to “automatically” provide configuration-data a desktop component, so that it could call back to our application. And our users just didn’t manage to configure it.
In the name of security, browsers made one path so hard to use, without considering what people would then develop instead.
And here we are now. Oops!
Unless you already know what to do it’s fairly unintuitive.
Most users don’t even know the difference between a single click and a double click.
Expecting them to even know what an external protocol is, or why it should be launched at all is completely unreasonable.
As someone who has had to develop and maintain a similar web-to-desktop bridge I can tell you that this one issue was responsible for around 90% of my company’s total support requests, despite only being a small feature in a optional addon in one of our main products.
For businesses just trying to keep their customers happy, this particular one click is a very real problem.
I can absolutely symphetize with people trying to come up with workarounds.