GUI Land Mines

Update! You can disable the annoying arrows via something like

    $ defaults write com.apple.finder QLInlinePreviewMinimumSupportedSize -9999

or whatever minimum icon size you want. Which leaves the question why the default isn't "turn the arrows off" when the icon is too small to really show anything (most icon sizes below, I don't know, at least 256x256 or possibly even larger), and given the "spooky action at distance" of clicks in the Finder messing up the progress in the PDF viewer application. You could have an application do one thing well, or could also try to do document viewing, poorly, in the Finder.

Thanks to tbsp for the tip.

Original Rant

So someone at Apple broke PDF file icons at some point,

The Finder, in Icon view, automatically presents double-arrows on those multi-page document icons when the pointing device passes over that icon, but not otherwise.

>

There is no user fix other than ignore it or choose another Finder view mode.

the problem being what I call GUI Land Mines, or that there are now two arrow icons that overlay PDF file icons. Given a file icon, one might possibly want to click on it to open the file. Big target, easy to click on. Right? But, no, someone at Apple added some land mines that blow up on you, and it being a mine field there's no easy way to clear said minefield. This leaves avoiding the minefield or careful mouse-work to avoid accidentally clicking on (or mousing over) something that's going to blow up on you.

What's wrong with the arrows, besides them making the file more difficult to open, and there being no easy and obvious means to turn the feature off? The state is shared with the PDF viewer, so if you've read to, say, page 417 in a PDF, but then accidentally click on one of the annoying and afaik useless arrows, the next time you manage to open the document in the PDF viewer it's now reset to page one or whatever. Whoops! Hopefully you remembered where you had read up to!

It took me a while to become aware of the bug as I'd mostly been using the terminal to open files, probably due to the terminal being less afflicted by this sort of creeping featurism, probably on account of Apple developers being busy improving other areas of the OS. However, it might be nice to have landmine-free file icons back, as it can be (or was, anyways) nice to have worry-free file icon clicking.

Another question is how did this feature clear all checks and balances (are there checks and balances on UI breaking changes? Like were there zero UI testers who said, "gee, I don't know, this makes opening files more difficult, might be bad for some of our users?") and escape into production.

P.S. Naturally the modern web is full of GUI land mines and other such noise, those cookie banners that among other things demonstrate a dubious understanding of the GDPR come to mind. Some of these annoyances can be turned off (maybe at the cost of having to login and thus be better tracked) while others can be blocked with essential tools such as uBlock Origin. Not so much better living but more like train wreck survival tips.