Blogger is notorious for "reimplementing the web experience". Just try opening a Blogger page on an iOS device. You'll get an empty page, then spinning gears, then after a while the page will finally land. Then you'll have a page which won't scroll properly. Because someone just had to reimplement scrolling. Better.

Let's take the horrible Onswipe themes as another example. They not only break functionality and make the page slower, but also break zooming in and show buttons that pretend to be iOS buttons, but aren't.

I could rant about this for hours. It's all the same basic problem: people trying to redefine/hijack basic browsing functionality. I interpret this as extreme hubris ("I know how to design this better!") or arrogance ("this is how you will view my site, period!").

The advice of this article is good, but I don't think it should be up to individual website authors to behave well. Ideally, there ought to be a standardized javascript API for binding control keys. Then the browser could prohibit rebinding if desired (while giving feedback to the webapp as to whether rebinding was allowed), and provide an accompanying UI for the user to see which controls are enabled/disabled, to whitelist or blacklist websites, and so on.

One of the dumbest I've run into is to jack ctrl-f and send it to a site search box. If I use ctrl-f, it's because I meant to do an entirely different thing, or by accident. In no case is it because I want to search your article archives.

Far worse are websites like Battle.net that hijack the onpaste events to prevent pasting passwords. Hijacking keyboard shortcuts may cause inconveniences but prohibiting password pasting is a security flaw.

Yahoo Mail hijacked the down arrow: Looking in the preview pain, press down arrow to scroll... and you jump to a new mail. Very, very jarring and frustrating. I recall they also hijacked a bunch of other keys, none of which made much sense, which is sad... mostly because it shows that they don't use their own products enough to see how this can affect users.

Well, I don't think it's a bad idea to have specific shortcuts which disable the normal behaviour of a browser, and improve the UX of a website. If they exists:

* they should be explicitly enabled (i.e. RES for reddit)

* you should be notified if they are changing browser behaviour, and an option to disable shall be provided.

My personal pet peeve is the hijacking of / for in page search...

The problem is not that sites are choosing to override browser shortcuts, but that they can do so at all. The browser should not allow its shortcuts to be overridden. In Vimperator you have to enter a pass-through mode, so this kind of overlap never happens.

I’m talking to you, Blogger.

Is this the same Blogger that requires JavaScript to view plain text? Or maybe I'm getting it confused with blogspot, I can never keep them all straight. In any case, I don't think it's a coincidence . . .

This speaks to a broader issue with trying to keep every hotkey at the top level when you have multiple, nested containers. There is a fantastic solution to this: have a leader key that says "I am talking to my browser", where one of the sub-commands is "pass a literal leader key through". This is the way screen/tmux and ratpoison handle key bindings, and it means there is literally zero chance of a collision that I can't trivially resolve by slightly modifying my interaction.

it sure is annoying, and let's not mention blogger's hyper-dependencies on javascript in order to display the page. No javascript, no content

anyway, well what can be done is - prompt for user agreement to allow these shortcuts, then save it as user preference / cookie / etc..

Ever tried the "Metro" version of Outlook Web Access, the one used with Office 365? It hijacks "Ctrl/Command + R" as a shortcut to "Reply". How oblivious is this?

This is just the result of transitioning HTML to an applications framework. Now the application you use to view articles is not your browser, but Blogger (or WP etc).

Yeah this is big to me. Even for system utilities. I use an OS X volume booster called "Boom"(http://www.globaldelight.com/boom/) (which is nonfree but worth the $7) and it, by default, hijacks cmd + +/- for zooming in chrome. Please don't do this!

I have noticed issues with Firefox shortcuts while on YouTube, and have wondered if this sort of skulduggery was going on.

Big examples would be PgUp and PgDn in Google+, and (at least on the old design), F5 on Twitter.

I’m talking to you, Stackoverflow. I use Ctrl-k, Ctrl-b quite often.

but what about things like ctrl-s and ctrl-b in Google Docs? Those are handy and I rarely save a page or create a bookmark by hotkey.

NoScript with whitelist works well enough.

So fucking true. Obnoxious javascript masturbation pattern #47,601 that will make me blacklist scripts from your site. Same for single-key shortcuts (I'm looking at you there, JIRA...).