What fresh Google Docs-flavoured hell is this?

Google Docs in Safari, with text selected, and the default browser context menu not showing any cut/copy/paste text handling options

Note how there is no “copy” option in that context menu, despite there being text selected in the window. Yes, on top of making computer bad at maths, and breaking a search engine so it tells plausible lies instead of just searching, Google’s other signature achievement is succeeding in breaking web browsers to such an extent that they can no longer recognise text as text.

Not content with hijacking keyboard shortcuts, GDocs has now made it so text cannot be copied using the browser’s context menu, but only with the keyboard shortcuts — which it is also messing with.1

No, I do not want my keyboard and mouse to behave differently depending on which browser tab is in focus, omg, get straight into the sea. You want to behave like a desktop app, build a desktop app (on second thoughts don’t, Google would simply bundle the twenty-seventh instance of Chrome on this machine just to run the Docs GUI).

Because of course the reason for this is that Google has built a whole other context menu just for Google Docs, which hijacks the browser’s native one. Here is how it looks in Chrome:

The same Google Docs view as above, except displayed in Chrome, with a custom context menu that is specific to Google Docs

This is making me unironically want to use Microsoft Office apps instead, which to be clear, are not good — but at least they have been relatively stable for years, instead of changing unpredictably with no notice or recourse. The last major controversy regarding the Office GUI that I can recall was when Microsoft introduced ribbon controls way back in Office 2007 — and honestly, I got used to that one pretty quickly. Why? Because while the toolbars changed, the keyboard shortcuts and menus (including context menus) that people used most frequently were untouched.

I defend Apple, and by implication Google, on sideloading, because there is significant user benefit to controls that prevent malicious code from executing without oversight. However, I do have a lot of sympathy for the objection that hardware makers should not dictate what I do with the hardware once I have bought it. And how much more egregious is this, messing with the basic functionality of my web browser on my own machine?

This is precisely why I run Safari rather than Chrome: because it still behaves like a web browser, not a runtime for apps, which is what Google appears to think Chrome should be. I run extensions dedicated entirely to unpicking Google’s overlays and just giving me clean standards-compliant views.

In summary, get off my lawn.

  1. One that particularly annoys me is “undo”. When I’m in the browser, Command-Z means “re-open the tab I just closed” — unless I have a Google Docs tab in focus, in which case it undoes something, which I probably will now need to re-do, in the hopeful assumption that I noticed what happened in the first place, instead of being misled into thinking that my shortcut didn’t register for whatever reason and undoing a few more changes before realising what actually happened. ↩