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Browsers & Technology / Re: The Awesomesauce of Chrome
Last post by ersi -Webbrowsers used to show webpages. Webpages used to be static text and images. The only glitzy-flashy parts were ad popups and embedded video-audio files. The ad popups were usually popouts. To prevent them, popup blockers were invented. Then ad popups moved into webpages. In fact, there are more popups than just ads that deserve to be blocked - most notoriously the cookie popups bureaucratically demanded by the EU despite all the harm it predictably caused to humanity for zero benefit - so the need for popup blockers is more acute than ever, yet there are no reliable popup blockers any more. The best I have seen out of the box in the area of ad/cookie/consent popup blockers is Brave browser. Something like /etc/hosts approach works to block the content of ads, but not their placeholders, so it is not real popup blocking.
When Opera went Chrome, smarter people had already noticed that the era of webbrowsers, as browsers of webpages, was over and the era of YT/FB apps had arrived. On FB you don't have a page. You have a service where you need to log in. The FB serves you a content feed interface and a chat-with-contacts interface. Both are somewhat customisable and provide notifications with limited reliability. This service would really be better provided by a specialised app - and it is - but in this day and age we have webbrowsers - all webbrowsers - built to serve it. If a webbrowser cannot do FB, the webbrowser is said to be not working. Which is ironic, because without logging in there is nothing to do on FB. A web address that only functions for logged in members should not dictate the webbrowser industry.
YT provides videos. I have never (never intentionally) been logged in to YT, but when logged in, you can subscribe/bookmark and comment and upload and have your "full experience" more or less like with FB. Different from FB, YT also works when not logged in. But the main content is videos - multimedia, not readable text. Again, since YT is not a standard webpage, it is sad to have it dictate the definition of webbrowsers.
So, one feature lost over recent years is popup blocking. Adblocking by means of adprovider addresses works, but it does not block their popups. This problem is superacute when it comes to the cookie popup madness. Webbrowsers still allow an internal setting to block all cookies, but this does not block cookie popups. The EU demands that people must get cookie popups regardless of the choices they make regarding cookies, so everybody gets cookie popups. This is a modern form of torture imposed on people who browse the web as a matter of their profession. Employers aid and abet the torture by preventing employees from using browsers of their choice, extensions of their choice, particularly self-developed extensions. No. All choices are done by the employer, whose sole choice is to limit all choices to MS defaults in compliance with the EU directives.
Another feature on the verge of extinction is the ability to work offline. In non-Chromite webbrowsers the button or menu item is still there, but websites increasingly fail to function when there is no live internet connection. Also when you block Javascript. Javascript used to be a tiny extra enhancement, but some webpages think it is fully legit to show nothing when Javascript is off, even when the actual content has no inherent dependence on it.
Chromites do not think RSS is a thing. To be honest, I never liked RSS as a protocol. I think it should have been designed as something of a content grabber, e.g. look at the webpage, take <h2> element and then all <p> elements until next <h2> element, and present the result to me, instead of a separate protocol with its essentially distinct content which apparently does not need to duplicate or be related to the webpage content in any way. But RSS is there, it is an internet protocol, and despite its inherent independence and unrelatedness it more or less serves webpage content in a specific format, so as such it should be a built-in webbrowser feature.
The same for other internet protocols: FTP, IRC, email, and whatnot. Chromites don't let people know about them, and the industry and legislators think this is perfectly fine. Let Chromites dictate what people know or don't.
I am most disappointed with simple formatting in modern internet. On my computer, on my screen, I should be able to see things the way I want or need, whether black on white or white on black, any colours I choose, any widths or lengths I choose. It is an obvious accessibility thing. But the industry and the legislators think that accessibility means adding zoom buttons to webpages, despite zoom buttons being a prominent eternally present and easily accessible built-in feature in all browsers. And of course making cookie popups and other consent and notification request unavoidable and obnoxious - this is awesome accessibility in the mind of legislators and the industry.
Formatting is most easily fixed with text-based webbrowsers, such as Elinks or W3m, but every now and then they are denied content due to Javascript. Again, an accessibility issue that the industry and legislators should care about. They care in words, but their actions demonstrate the opposite.
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DnD Central / Re: DnD entropy
Last post by jax -Oops…
17 days and change.
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DnD Central / Re: DnD entropy
Last post by Frenzie -
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DnD Central / Re: DnD entropy
Last post by jax -Last post: 2021-11-17, 09:51:25
This post: 2021-12-03, 19:07:12
Old interval: 15 days, 8 hours, 18 minutes and 55 seconds
This interval: 16 days, 9 hours, 15 minutes and 47 seconds
Previous delta: 19 hours, 23 minutes and 10 seconds.
This delta: 1 day, 56 minutes and 52 seconds.
That seems a fair approximation to the Realist school that has been very influential in the US
Last post 2024-04-07, 08:55:43
This post 2024-04-24, 11:48:14
Last interval: 16 days, 9 hours, 15 minutes and 47 seconds
This interval: 17 days, 2 hours, 52 minutes and 31 seconds
Previous delta: 1 day, 56 minutes and 52 seconds
This delta: 17 hours, 36 minutes and 44 seconds.
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Otter Browser Forum / Re: Logging in to Github
Last post by Frenzie -Is that a scam to get people's phone numbers or is it just a classic case of "everything Microsoft touches turns to $h17?"I suspect it's not so much Microsoft as bots, if they're pushing it. Although it's true that Microsoft et al seem to have some ideas about 2FA as well…
BTW I just realized I posted this in the Otter forums. Feel free to move it to a more appropriate location if you want.Seeing how Otter is on GitHub it seems quite appropriate to me.
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Otter Browser Forum / Re: Logging in to Github
Last post by beastie -But today it's gone back to not working. These companies are as efficient as the government. I wonder how they're still in business.
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Otter Browser Forum / Re: Logging in to Github
Last post by beastie -BTW I just realized I posted this in the Otter forums. Feel free to move it to a more appropriate location if you want.
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Otter Browser Forum / Re: Logging in to Github
Last post by ersi -The result: Cannot log in.
Is that a scam to get people's phone numbers or is it just a classic case of "everything Microsoft touches turns to $h17?"Yes and yes.
What can I say? Everybody move over to Gitlab. This is similar to when Freenode was hijacked. An alternative had to be set up and everybody moved there.
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Otter Browser Forum / Logging in to Github
Last post by beastie -At first I used to receive the verification code on my email almost instantaneously but in the last few days, it started taking more and more time. Yesterday I tried to log in, had to click the resend button four times before calling it quits. Searching the interwebs, it seems to be an old problem.
Apparently they sent the emails in bulk because today I got the four email. They sent them all at 1AM... like 3 hours after the codes had already expired. *facepalm*
Is that a scam to get people's phone numbers or is it just a classic case of "everything Microsoft touches turns to $h17?"