GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 494753
Deleting recent files list in "places" menu bar should not need a confirmation dialog box
Last modified: 2020-11-06 20:21:59 UTC
Considering that deleting recent files list in "places" menu bar doesn't delete any file, shall we bother the user with a confirmation dialog box ? I think we should balance benefits/drawbacks of this type of confirmation dialog box : - Confirmation dialog boxes bother the user so they should be used only when necessary - Confirmation dialog boxes must not be generalized or the user will always valdate them without reading them That's why i think that the confirmation dialog box that appears while trying to delete recent files list in "places" menu bar should be removed. Other information:
*** Bug 521533 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
from GNOME HIG : If an action is very dangerous, and there is no way to undo the result, warn the user and ask for confirmation. Only do this in extreme cases, though; if frequently faced with such confirmation messages, users begin to ignore them, making them worse than useless. In all cases, the user's work is sacrosanct. Nothing your application does should lose or destroy user's work without explicit user action. http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/principles-forgiveness.html
This bug is still present in GNOME 2.28 It's not a minor bug since it affects the whole GNOME experience : if the user sees too many confirmation dialog boxes, he will stop reading all of them. That is the same problem that the one related to the notification area : if applications display their icon in it without discernment, the notification area becomes useless and the whole GNOME experience regresses. Please don't bother the user with an unnecessary confirmation dialog box (deleting recent files list in "places" menu bar doesn't delete any file) Besides the confirmation dialog box is now bigger than before with a lot of text in it. Which would be cool except than user will never read all that poetry. Remember one of Joel Spolsky's principle : users don't read stuff (1) (1) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062.html
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