I think overall the complaint is every type of experience. Including native apps. You can't simply dev tools inside of a native app. Even with Charles proxy or something you'd be grasping at straws trying to figure out what may be the actual issue (and at that point you probably can't work around it anyway)
So the options for power users are still here, but they just aren't front and center as they used to as you said. This reminds me a little bit of the discussion around the iphone not being customizable and the response being that you have the option to just get an android phone instead.
At some point in the spectrum here one must become lazy when they can't be bothered to click on a few things or find an alternate product, and you become entitled when you demand power user features to become front and center when the vast majority won't ever need to use the features.
I've always had the opinion that it's possible to have a middle ground. User friendly defaults, the ability to dig deeper and the ability to make advanced features more readily accessible. It's not easy though, picking one or the other is definitely a lot easier.
Prime example: Twitter always responds "oops, something went wrong" even if the backend returns `{ error: "Video aspect ration is not allowed. Try 16:9" }`
People's heads aren't going to explode if you treat them like functioning adults.
But why do bookmarklets run with the security context of the currently opened page? I have one self-written bookmarklet to capture the page title and url into emacs for storing it there. Firefox asks me every time I click on that bookmarklet on a new origin (domain, protocol tuple) whether I want to allow that. With no option to avoid that. I have written this piece of code myself I want to use it to enhance my workflow. There is no need to treat it like any javascript hosted on a CDN, or on a Facebook server.
My day job is C++ app and driver code for rather complex systems yet when I open browser dev tools my eyes glaze over. There is plenty of middle ground of people who are technical but are not web or browser developers.
There’s a lot to look at in there, but there’s some usual suspects tabs that people look at the majority of the time they have dev tools open. And conversely some tabs that you probably only use in the web dev scene. I’d highly recommend perusing the network and storage tabs, for things like status codes and cookies, respectively. As I mentioned, the vertical is nowhere near as high as you’re saying, you’ll figure it out if you look at it more.
I don't think we did. The trend in the past few years is to dumb down all tools, especially UI tools, to the lowest common denominator.
No, most software today is designed for the use case that you have never seen the software before. That is implicitly enforced by the way most companies do A/B testing. The experiments show a new part of the UI to an unsuspecting user without any upfront knowledge that they are part of an experiment. Therefore the variant that has the lowest hurdle for the most common case of the most common user is optimized. So it is basically ignored that people tend to learn how to use their tools.
Learning to learn your tools is even made harder by constantly changing UIs. Reading documentation, following tutorial, watching introduction videos is basically useless for a software that will change whenever a product manager needs to complete an increment for his KPIs.
I'm pretty sure A/B testing has become a cult whose rituals are often practiced in a way that leads people away from meaningful or productive outcomes.
Is there anywhere else you've found where people are talking about this (either from a perspective of how to do it better or what else to do instead)?
Yep, it's fun when you go to a site where you have a log in but it expired and have to search for the tiny 'sign in' button that's mostly covered by the sign up form.
I think the change was very simple - we stopped bothering with middleground. "Power Users" were treated like "users, but a bit more", so we had 'users', 'power users', and 'developers'. All that happened is that we just accepted that power user can have the same access to tools as developers.
We didn't stop giving power users extra power. We gave power users more power.