I received a pull request for Markdown Here that was great: it found a bug, fixed it, and included tests for the fix. However, the PR submitter didn’t write the tests using the existing framework, so I figured I’d massage his test code into the proper form.
And then I noticed that he included a copyright line in the test file. It says “MIT License”, which is the license used for the rest of the project, but that got me thinking about what that might mean…
Page actions – the buttons in a browser’s address bar – are a surprising UI failure.
When adding a button for a browser extension, a choice must be made whether to make it a “page action” or a “browser action” (button on the toolbar). But browsers have failed to communicate the interactiveness of page actions, and almost no one – techy or layman – realizes that they’re clickable.
To complement the context menu item and hotkey, and to fulfil a user feature request, I decided to add a button to the Markdown Here browser extension. It turned out that simply deciding where to put the button was a big part of the effort…