Worse, this creates a bad habit. What if the UI changes and now it's the username that pops up first, not a password box?
So it's a hard-to-discover feature, and a misfeature unless you elect to keep this behavior forever.
Because this only happens on the lock screen when there's no user to be entered/selected. There's no slide-up on the initial login.
Re:The Decline of Usability
by TheKarateKid on Saturday April 18, 2020 @03:34AM
(#22905998)
Wow, I would’ve never guessed that. Apple has a terrible habit of burying obscure UX features.
It’s a shame really because these undocumented features mean 99% of people WON’T ever use them. Isn’t that counterproductive to engineers?
Why aren’t employees speaking out against this?
macOS hides the password field to encourage people to use Touch ID instead, but Ubuntu probably doesn't even support fingerprint login...
Every mainstream Linux distro supports fingerprint login natively just by virtue of using PAM.
Funnily enough, so does every Mac by virtue of using PAM ;)
(Interesting aside: I complained to someone on the Mac Safari team that it was difficult to search open tabs, and he told me that apparently this feature already exists! You go into the tab overview, and…just start typing. A little search bar will pop into appearance in the top right corner. Why it couldn't just be there and have keyboard focus from the start, I have no idea…)