In usability heuristics, that's called an accelerator. We would normally call it a shortcut. Whatever you call it, the point is it's an alternative to doing it in a more accessible way, not THE way.

I understand that, maybe they’ve done studies on how often people reload a page and made a decision based on numbers. After 20 years of browsing the web, at least for me, THE way became the shortcut and I never click on that (now useless) button. I can understand why they pushed it a click away, maybe numbers/studies back this up, maybe not. Personally I like having some buttons on the toolbar but I think I prefer the cleaner UI even more and I don’t mind doing 1 click to find them back. Anyway when we play games we never count clicks right? It’s not like it really cost us anything … but that’s just me.

> After 20 years of browsing the web, at least for me, THE way became the shortcut and I never click on that

Again, that’s an accelerator. That’s for advanced use. So you’re an advanced user, good on you. Things are not designed just for advanced users.

> I can understand why they pushed it a click away, maybe numbers/studies back this up

No studies would back up making an interface less discoverable, thus less intuitive for new users, and also increasing cognitive load by requiring users to remember where something is rather than it just being there. ‘…’ and hamburger menus have always been poor substitutes for well-designed navigation hierarchies.

Someone actually ran the new tabs against Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics, respected in the industry for 27 years: https://twitter.com/feetsnz/status/1403849426683138053

The results were not good.

There are no numbers on the planet that could justify lowering usability. Apple themselves gave a WWDC session on how minimalism != usability. Of course, they can have a minimalist interface; that should never come at the expense of usability. They don’t eat their own dog food.

> Anyway when we play games we never count clicks right?

What do games have to do with a web browser?

You are right

If I CMD+R on Hacker News, it reloads the page. If I do it on outlook.office.com, it starts drafting a reply to the email I have selected. Reload button does the same thing everywhere.

This is one thing I'm grateful for as a Firefox user, I can disallow websites from overriding built-in shortcuts both globally or on a site-by-site basis. I don't believe Safari offers this unfortunately.

Yes, I wish webapps didn't put unnecessary keyboard shortcuts (or disable them by default)

I use ⌘+R and actually just press R with vimari but if i'm just casually scrolling the web with my mouse sometimes I just want to press the reload button which is now two clicks.