| ▲ | musicale 13 hours ago |
| The iron law of web encrapification: every web feature will (if possible) be employed to abuse the user, usually to push advertising. |
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| ▲ | endgame 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I cannot even reliably press [Space] any more to page down through sites that are meant to be all about content! |
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| ▲ | kiddico 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've always found that behavior baffling so it's interesting to hear someone using it as intended instead of being frustrated by it. | | |
| ▲ | consp 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It used to be a de facto standard in many programs. Since almost no mouse had a scroll wheel, you'd use the space bar or the cursor keys. Spacebar was usually faster, I guess some people still do. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I do this too. The pattern probably dates back to first Unix pagers, or perhaps to the paper era. | |
| ▲ | zelphirkalt 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Still doing that, also in Thunderbird, to scroll through E-Mails and go to the next one when reaching the end (or pressing "n" or "p" for previous). I even use shift + space to go up again. I thought it was very common. Another alternative, maybe a bit more intuitive is using page up and down buttons. |
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| ▲ | asimovDev 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | i love it. my mac doesn't have the home row (don't know if that's how that row of buttons is called) so I use spacebar and shift+spacebar as pgdown and pgup when I am reading | | |
| ▲ | fsckboy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >the home row (don't know if that's how that row of buttons is called) the "home row" is where your fingers start out if you know how to type by touch, and it come from the days of typewriters instead of keyboards. on a QWERTY keyboard, the home row is ASDFGHJKL; with your fingers resting on ASDF and JKL; when they teach you to touch type, they say "put your fingers on the home row" and "home is where your fingers always return to." | |
| ▲ | unkl_ 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [fn]+[up arrow] = pgup, [fn]+[down arrow] = pgdown, [fn]+[left arrow] = home, [fn]+[right arrow] = end | | |
| ▲ | lxgr 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | These are impossible to press with just one hand (or the bottom of my coffee cup in a pinch), though. | | |
| ▲ | justin_dash 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I use option + up arrow or option + down arrow sometimes, works the same as spacebar to page up / page down. | | |
| ▲ | lxgr 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | In which browser? Doesn't work in Firefox, unfortunately. |
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| ▲ | zelphirkalt 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Home row" usually refers to the row where you initially put your fingers when touch typing, to not have to move them much while typing. | |
| ▲ | LoganDark 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They're called the navigation keys. Fn + Up/Down (arrow keys) is PgUp/PgDn, and Fn + Left/Right is Home/End. But of course, those keys are on completely opposite sides of the keyboard, so Space is more convenient. | | |
| ▲ | asimovDev 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | yeah, with spacebar i can use either of my hands while the arrow keys would require me to use both of my hands | | |
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| ▲ | globular-toast 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is my biggest gripe with modern browsers. Stop fucking with my keyboard. I want my keyboard to control my agent, not some script. No key seems to be safe. The quick-search key (/) is often overriden by "clever" web devs, but not even in a consistent way. Ctrl-K to go to the browser search box is gone. I use emacs keybindings in text boxes, but those can be randomly overriden by scripts (e.g. Ctrl-B might by overridden to make stuff "bold" etc.). I want to be able to say "Don't let any script have access to these keyboard keys". But apparently that can't be done even with extensions. I've strongly considered forking Firefox to do this, but I know how much effort that would be to maintain. How hard would it be to write scripts that expose an interface that the user can bind to keys themselves, if they wish to? | |
| ▲ | turtleyacht 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | One more for the spacebar to advance the page. Have never encountered a broken site (so far). Fingers crossed. |
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| ▲ | chongli 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It really comes down to JavaScript. The web was fine when sites were static HTML, images, and forms with server-side rendering (allowing for forums and blogs). |
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| ▲ | pottertheotter 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Did you use the web back in 1995? It was fun, but it also sucked compared to what we have now. Nothing is ever perfect, but I wouldn’t want to go back. | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I’d go back in a heartbeat. Making the web a software SDK was the worst thing to happen to it. | | |
| ▲ | arjie 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Gemini websites are pretty much the old web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) Both in terms of comprehensiveness and in terms of functionality. | | |
| ▲ | jl6 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Geminispace is a very chill place. It’s definitely not a replacement for the web, but if you can handle the compromises, it feels like both the past and the future. |
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| ▲ | socalgal2 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So, apparently you don't use google maps (or any other mapping website) | | |
| ▲ | phkahler 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That could be a web app. | |
| ▲ | krater23 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The data that google maps is caching in my browser is more than Google World needed disc space back then. So why not just use Google World for that? |
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| ▲ | skydhash 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I read epubs, and html pages derived from texinfo and mandoc. When I see websites that just break down when you disable JS (I do it with ublock), I always feel a pang of sadness. Unless you’re Figma, Google doc, or OpenStreetMap…, which rely heavily on local state, JS should only be required for small island of interaction. | |
| ▲ | collabs 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You talk about 1995 but I wouldn't even go back to 1999. Dialup was so painful. It advertised 56 know but in practice I never even say 48... | | |
| ▲ | yjftsjthsd-h 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | That seems like a separate thing. You can send 199x-era HTML over a gigabit connection. |
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| ▲ | hnlmorg 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I wrote web pages in 1995. There was actually plenty you could do, but it was all server side driven. And the ironic thing is you are chatting on a forum that could have easily been built in 1995. | |
| ▲ | bonesss 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I published my first website in 1995 (and while it wasn’t even a little popular, eventually a spammy gay porn site popped up with the exact same joke name, leading to a pretty odd early “what if you search for your own site” experience). If you put 2026 media players (with modern bandwidth), on the manually curated small-editorial web of ‘95 it’d be amazing. We used to have desktop apps, these SPA JS monstrosities are the result of MS missing the web then MS missing mobile. Instead of a desktop monopoly where ActiveX could pop up (providing better app experiences in many cases than one would think), we have cross-platform electron monstrosities and fat react apps that suck, are slow, and omfgbbq do they break. And suck. And eat up resources. Copy and paste breaks, scrolling breaks, nav gets hijacked, dark mode overridden. Netflix, Spotify, MS have apps I see breaking on the regular on prime mainstream hardware. My modern gaming windows laptop, extra juicy GPU for all the LLM and local kubernetes admin, chokes on windows rendering. Windows isn’t just regressing, their entire stack is actively rotting, and all behind fancy web buttons. Old man yelling at cloud, but: geeeez boys, I want to go back. | |
| ▲ | robotswantdata 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’d go back. The BBS and dial up days look cosy Now it’s owned by corporates and everyone is using bloated JS frameworks. | | |
| ▲ | roygbiv2 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | There are still BBS you can access via telnet (and actual dial up if you really want), after the fifth one asks you for your full name, street address and phone Humber it gets a little old. |
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| ▲ | peterspath 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would also go back in a heartbeat | |
| ▲ | wmf 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're not wrong but we've never really tried the combination of modern CSS with no JS. It could produce elegant designs that load really fast... or ad-filled slop but declarative. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes to the modern CSS. To go as far back as suggested would mean using frames again and table based layouts with 1x1 invisible gifs to use for spacing layouts. Never again! | |
| ▲ | chongli 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ads don’t work nearly as well without JavaScript for adtech. They’re basically limited to static banners and text ads as well as sponsorships. | | |
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| ▲ | themafia 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Did you use the web back in 1995? I'm still not over the loss of Gopher. |
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| ▲ | miki123211 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The web was not fine. If you wanted to accomplish anything more substantial than reading static content (like an email client that beeps when you get an important email, or a chat app that shows you new messages as they come in), you needed to install a desktop app. That required you to be on the same OS that the app developer supported (goodbye Linux on the desktop), as well as to trust the dev a lot more. We seem to have collectively forgotten the trauma of freeware. Operating an installer in the mid 2000s was much like walking through a minefield; one wrong move, and your computer was infected with crapware that kept changing your home page and search engine. It wasn't just shady apps, mainstream software (I definitely remember uTorrent and Skype doing this) was also guilty. Even updates weren't safe. | | |
| ▲ | chongli an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I use a desktop mail client. I have always used desktop applications. I have never had any desire to use web mail clients. Likewise for office suite applications. A true desktop spreadsheet, word processor, and slide deck are always superior. The web as an application platform has always been a half-baked, second class, inferior experience for the user. It has always been about developer convenience at the expense of the user. No thank you! | |
| ▲ | encom 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Somehow we have cross platform software today that isn't Electron slop. And shoehorning absolutely everything into what used to be a document oriented application, creating this grotesque mutant abomination we have today, has just moved the minefield. How many RCE's has Chromium had? Also, up until Windows Vista, Microsoft thought that making every account on their OS root by default was an amazing idea, further exacerbating the problem you describe, which I don't deny existed. Software distribution on Windows is still a shit-show today, but I guess there's too much momentum to move to a Linux-style repository. The Microsoft Store is a piss poor attempt. |
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| ▲ | raincole 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If JavaScript hadn't been a thing, Flash and JavaApplet would have been far more popular than they were and I really don't appreciate that timeline. | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | JavaScript didn’t kill Flash a Java. The web becoming cross platform did. People started browsing on a plethora of devices from the Dreamcast to PDAs. And then Steve Jobs came a long and doubled down on the shift in accessibility. His stance on Flash was probably the only thing I agreed with him on too. |
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| ▲ | AuthAuth 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It wasnt "fine". | | |
| ▲ | atoav 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh, the social media was much, much better. People much more open, tracking didn't exist. All the idiots still thought computers were only a thing for nerds and kids. |
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| ▲ | miki123211 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is the price we pay for openness and decentralization. On one side, we have Apple giving us great APIs but telling us how to use them. On the other, we have W3C being extremely conservative with what they expose, exactly because of things like this. |
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| ▲ | pwdisswordfishq 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is the price we pay for stuffing browsers with tons of imperative APIs that the browser has no choice but to implement to the letter, since analysing how they are actually used runs afoul of Rice's theorem. | |
| ▲ | phoronixrly 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is the price we pay for bloat... |
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| ▲ | xnx 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Those features that can't be used to show more ads will be used for fingerprinting. |
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| ▲ | zelphirkalt 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I feel like we need a complete black box layer or something, where a website can send requests to the browser to do something, but never gets any kind of reply, as to whether anything actually happened. But that would limit usefulness of it quickly, I guess. | | |
| ▲ | Permik an hour ago | parent [-] | | I've been toying with an idea of creating a JS runtime that tries to run all code two times, one which runs all identifying information inside a runtime that has any network API's stubbed, and another that replaces the identifying info with garbage. Most likely needs manual quirk code overlays for sites, but it's totally a solvable problem. |
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| ▲ | surcap526 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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