IrfanView

Maybe I’ll get some hate for this, but years ago when I worked at a civil engineering firm this was the default image viewer IT had mapped every image file to open with - it was a nightmare! Every coworker I had (myself included) would constantly complain about the number of times they had to change to [literally anything else]. There were three distinct things I remember we all hated: 1. The image never opened full size, the window was always small and you had to manually drag the window frame to make it viewable. 2. It didn’t “zoom in” when you used your mouse wheel correctly, it would instead cycle through all of the images open in the folder you were working in. 3. When you clicked the arrows at the top to flip through a group of photos in the folder you were in (I recall the keyboard arrow keys not working for this, too), once you reached the end it would go to a black “fake” image, that you then couldn’t arrow back. It didn’t just cycle through the images, you had to close the window and reopen the image you were on.

Needless to say, I have zero fond memories of this program. Maybe these were nuances of our particular setup (many other such cases at that firm, sadly), but…eh, whatever. There’s better out there.

Those are all settings you could have changed yourself. IrfanView is the best image viewer on Windows, hands down.

Expressing a viewpoint necessitates a downvote?

And not once in all this time did you open settings and change these behaviours (which you can)? Weird.

Not once in all that time did I consider using a program with hostile default settings. Weird how hard this might be for an image viewer.

See also complaining about downvotes.

I'm with you. To me IrfanView always felt incredibly archaic and chaotic, and I never wanted to wade through its 5 billion settings to "fix" it for me. But I guess some people just care more about UX while others just want as many features as possible, and I'm glad it's there for the latter camp.

Dysfunction in the IT of civil engineering (and similar) professions is fairly common. I remember this exact phenomenon too - of Irfanview's default UI controls not suiting what the staff were used to. And the staff didn't need The Most Powerful Tool Under The Sun, they just wanted to view and zoom and browse, and a few other tools, using the keypresses and mouse movements they were used to from previous software.

And Irfanview could do those things in it's sleep with both hands tied, with a few simple config changes. But the dysfunction - often rooted in the minimal, grudging acknowledgement given to IT by (non-IT) old professions - led to a lot of half-assed setups where staff butted their heads against obstacles that were often a mere few clicks away from improvement, if only they'd known to put their attention there. But of course, they were too busy being civil engineers.

And if I may shoehorn another point in here : it's not as though AutoCAD and other such industry software comes with ready default settings. If you used those straight out of the box with no customisation for your own situation, you'd be in deep trouble.

Nothing wrong with expressing an opinion, and I'm not here to defend you against downvoters, but from my perspective it's an uninformed opinion. All of the "issues" you identified are really just preferences and the dev was kind enough to let you configure the app as you'd like. It would be impossible for the dev to create a set of custom settings that every user finds perfect, so your other comment about "hostile defaults" comes across as entitled

The app is incredibly good. It does everything you could want, it's less than 10MB, blazing fast and easy to use. Super configurable. I used to have to fight with IT to have it installed or find a way to run some portable version just to have it at work.

I can't speak for others, but I think if you had spent a little bit more time trying to figure out the solution to the issues you identify, you would have found the answer, but somehow you are instead blaming the dev, which is what IMHO warrants downvotes.

Agreed that the Irfanview default settings are questionable in some cases. And I personally find the UI hard to work with because nothing is ever where I expect it to be, with the important display option settings buried in a nested menu.

But it is highly configurable, and I think you're catching grief because it really doesn't sound like you or your colleagues made any attempt to take advantage of that.

on HN only few people can downvote, I wonder why, in order to make sure down votes are justified? If so, that fails miserably :D