Wireshark

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with Wireshark, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 13 complaints

Lua API is very annoying to use for writing custom protocol dissectors2025-10-14
GUI becomes almost unusable when analyzing very large packet captures with filters2023-12-05
Hijacks keyboard input when user wants to type elsewhere, and menu hover behaves unexpectedly2023-02-26
Infrequent users must relearn the tool from scratch each time they need it2022-12-01
Idle devices flood the capture so it scrolls too fast to follow2021-11-23
Scrolling causes extreme CPU usage due to poorly written scroll hijacking2020-07-10
Documentation confusing, left unsure of best practices2019-09-10
Toolbar icons are unclear, grayed-out state and capture start are hard to figure out2017-02-05
Wireshark's filter syntax is fiddly, so simple tasks take longer to figure out2016-03-17
Start button greyed out with no explanation of why capture won't start2015-12-18
Tiny progress bar at bottom gives no clear sign that large files are loading2015-12-18
Gave up on the Mac version due to X11 dependency, slowness and crashes2013-10-17
UI is ugly and clunky, hard to use despite being loved2012-02-21