Today I learned the calculator app allows character deletion. Weirdly you can swipe both left/right and they both behave as backspace. That’s pretty weird!

I knew the other gestures, which are nice conveniences. The lack of clear controls in the calculator is a good example of poor discoverability. The other examples are actions which all have more obvious alternatives, either visible in the UI (tab switching of various sorts) or more directly interacting (caret placement). I think it’s fine that those are less discoverable because you don’t actually need to know they exist unless you want to, and they become obvious when you find them.

With, uh, one big exception: the new tab/back button thing is an excellent idea, and I even remember it being announced as a major new Safari feature (on macOS! It might’ve even still been called OS X it’s been around so long). But it’s horribly buggy, leaving phantom tabs and history behind at every turn, and has been the same since it shipped. I think I have a mental model of how it works and its failure modes, but just imagining the explanation is exhausting.