Re: My user experience with pgAdmin 4.

I think that the fundamental issue is that pgAdmin 3 was a stand-alone app, and, as such, supported a set of features. The big one here is isolation; the pgAdmin environment was unaffected by much outside of it.

For good or for ill, the decision was taken to write a new admin program as a web page. To the extent that this requires running the admin in the “system browser”, isolation takes a big hit. It should be possible, desirable even, to build a fork of Chrome or Firefox that is dedicated to browsing pages from the admin server. That could certainly be done independently of the core pgAdmin 4 product. But that would be a pretty big project in itself.

One easier suggestion would be to embrace the psql app. It is certainly not “the same thing”, that is true, but it is very powerful, and very useful, and is completely unaffected by whatever nonsense is going on in my browser. For some tasks, it is *much* easier than a GUI. And it starts up instantly.

Just a thought.

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 4, 2019, at 4:43 PM, Robert Eckhardt <reckhardt@pivotal.io> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 5, 2019 at 1:51 AM <tutiluren@tutanota.com> wrote:
>
> Every day, whenever I want to administrate my PG databases, I click the pgAdmin 4 icon in the Taskbar. This causes a splash screen to start loading for a very long time (if it's the first time since the computer was started for the day) and eventually opens my normal browser (Firefox, which I don't even like, but it's the least horrible one left) with a new tab for pgAdmin 4.
>
> Now, even after disabling the "master password" stuff, I'm always forced to enter the password and pointlessly click the "remember" checkbox, only to be greeted with the same prompts every single day. This is because I (like any sane human) clears all browser data in Firefox many times a day. Which means pgAdmin 4 keeps forgetting the credentials, because it's piggybacking on Firefox and storing its settings in whatever manner Firefox does it, and then it's cleared constantly when I perform my routine privacy task.
>
> Even if it didn't do this, it would still be very awkward and bad for a multitude of reasons to have the database administration GUI as part of my normal web browser. It just seems fundamentally wrong to me. Whenever you need to restart the browser or clear all data/tabs, you lose your "state" in pgAdmin 4 and have to connect to it once again, starting all over. It truly cripples me.
>
> I get that it's *easier* for the developers to just ignore this fundamental problem, because they apparently don't use it themselves, or have very different "work flows", and everyone seems to be taking the "easy" way out these days, observable in virtually every aspect of life, but it doesn't make it less obnoxious for the user. At least for this user.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this.

You have basically written an email that says that your workflow
cannot align with a browser based UI. There is not much to do here
other than change your workflow or change to a UI that isn't browser
based.

All the downside and problems you have mentioned aren't product
problems, they are tech restrictions that come from using a browser.
If the need for a browser were dropped and pgAdmin was rewritten as a
native client app then a different person could come in and simply
write a similar email about all of the downsides inherent with a
native app.

>
> I honestly have no idea who the pgAdmin 4 developers are, so it's nothing personal against them, but every day when I'm subjected to things like this, a certain hate grows within me toward whoever is responsible for making the bad decisions which affect me negatively. If the program had its own GUI and didn't harass me in all kinds of ways, I would instead constantly feel positive feelings toward the authors.
>
> The only reason I still care about pgAdmin 4 is that there is no alternative. I've spent countless hours researching the so-called "alternatives", and they all have some major show-stopper about them. This one at least feels like a "kind of" official project. I just wish it didn't make dealing with my PostgreSQL databases feel like such a chore.

The question I have is; understanding that this is a browser based
application. What could be done to improve your workflow?

-- Rob