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Slowing Down: Disabling the Accelerator icon

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We've had a few folks write to the IEBlog asking "How can I disable the little blue accelerator icon that appears when text is selected in a HTML page? "  

      Accelerator Icon

For end users, the answer is straightforward: Click Tools > Internet Options > Advanced, and untick Display Accelerator button on selection inside the "Browsing" section of the list.  After doing so, the Accelerator icon will no longer appear in pages when you select text. Policy junkies can set a DWORD named SelectionActivityButtonDisable with value 1 under HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Services to prevent users from changing the setting.

While disabling the icon is straightforward for end-users, there's no easy way for web developers to do so.  This stands in contrast to the "opt-out" mechanisms provided by some other legacy features, which offered web developers the ability to disable certain end-user conveniences as desired.  When considering whether we should offer a mechanism for sites to "opt-out" of Accelerators, we were presented with an interesting tradeoff-- should websites be allowed to disable features the user wants to use?

To many users, the answer seems clear: "Of course not! It's my browser, I paid for it (Windows), and I should be in control of my web browsing experience. "

To many web developers, the answer also seems clear: "Of course! It's my website! I made it, and users should experience it as I want them to. If they don't like the experience, they can go elsewhere!"

(Astute readers might recognize that this type of debate comes up when discussing other browsing features, like popup blockers, ad-blockers, Flash blockers, and so on.)  

Of course, there are other considerations as well-- for instance, one of the top user-complaints about our HTML Forms AutoComplete feature is "It doesn't work-- I don't see any of my previously entered text."  When debugging such cases, we usually find that the site has explicitly disabled the feature using the provided attribute, but of course, users have no idea that the site has done so and simply assume that IE is buggy.  In my experience, when features are hidden or replaced, users will usually blame the browser, not the website.

In this case, the team decided that keeping the user in control was of paramount importance.  Users get to choose which services they plug into their browser, and we think it's critical that their choices are respected.  It would be super-annoying if, for instance, you could only use (for instance) Yahoo-provided services on Yahoo-owned sites, Google-provided services on Google-owned sites, Microsoft-provided services on Microsoft-owned sites, and so on.   It would be especially annoying if each site exposed these services differently (a trend you might have started to see on some major sites).  User-choice forces service providers to compete on the merits of the services they offer.

At this point, web developers typically protest "But I wouldn't do this everywhere-- only in a few little bits where it makes sense!"   Even if that's true, unfortunately, this is yet another case where there's really no way for the browser to tell the difference.  Remember, popup windows were once a happy, useful part of the web browsing experience, until their abuse by advertisers made them the bane of users everywhere. Inevitably, all browsers began blocking popups, breaking even the "good" sites that used popups with good taste and discretion.

In this case, we did our best to minimize web developers' concerns by ensuring that the Accelerator icon is kept "out of the way" -- you'll notice that we work hard to avoid overlapping the selected text/content, and the button stays transparent unless you actually hover over it.  Also, the icon will not appear for selections in text boxes or HTML editors.

Ultimately, there are few easy answers, but more than anything else, the challenge of making the right tradeoffs is what keeps my job interesting.

Thanks for reading!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2009
    Why not just leave Accelerators in the right-click context menu?   Having the blue button display over new text is a new UI convention that doesn't make sense or have any significant precedence in other interfaces. It does not shorten the number of user actions required, (compared to the right-click menu) and only using a glyph gives it more limited usability discovery than the standard menu convention.

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2009
    <blockquote> for instance, one of the top user-complaints about our HTML Forms AutoComplete feature is "It doesn't work-- I don't see any of my previously entered text."  When debugging such cases, we usually find that the site has explicitly disabled the feature using the provided attribute, but of course, users have no idea that the site has done so and simply assume that IE is buggy. </blockquote> The users are correct in their assumption. As you have demonstrated, websites should not be in control of user features like this. Therefore this attribute should be ignored by IE8 (regardless of how previous versions have behaved). Never the less, I wanted to say thanks for making IE8. Thanks for reinvigorating the competition between browsers, and thanks for bringing those who don't know what a browser is out of the Dark Ages with automatic updates. But one problem remains: is there a way you can at least force IE6 users to update to IE7?

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2009
    >"Therefore this attribute should be ignored by IE8" It's not an unreasonable suggestion, but we know that websites will simply work around autocomplete by changing their pages so that it doesn't work anymore (e.g. by changing the URLs and form-entry field names). This isn't theoretical-- we've seen financial sites that do this. > is there a way you can at least force IE6 users to update to IE7? No.

  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2010
    Put accelerators on the right click menu, not on every text selection. Annoying!

  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2010
    @grrr: As noted in the article, that option is available in the Advanced tab.

  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2011
    It's not working for me in the current IE9 Beta to disable the accelerator button when selecting text. Not via Advanced tab, nor via policy (the option is greyed out now in the Advanced tab with a notice beneath saying the administrator locked some settings) - but the icon still appears when selecting any text. I hate it!

  • Anonymous
    January 19, 2011
    @Arnot: I don't have a beta copy to test right now, but the checkbox works fine in the current build of IE9 (keep in mind that you must restart IE after changing its state).