Irony: The web page that rails about the web being user hostile is coded so that Safari's user-friendly reader mode is disabled.
To be fair, reader mode is a pile of mostly opaque heuristics and it can be tricky to opt-in/out.
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
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Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#12>If you use Chrome as your main browser, consider switching to Chromium, the open-source version of the browser. Consider minimalist browsers like Min (and choose to block all ads, trackers and scripts) to browser news websites. no love for firefox? or for that matter, any non webkit browsers? >HERE WeGo for maps (free) i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy
It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.
My experience has been that Firefox was unusably slow on OS X and Linux for a long time and they lost a lot of users because of it. Now it is faster but it is difficult to woo people back.
And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#13Irony: The web page that rails about the web being user hostile is coded so that Safari's user-friendly reader mode is disabled.
Author here. Is it? It works on my end. Could you tell me which OS/Safari version you're using? Thanks.
In case you're getting unsure: it works fine in Firefox's reader mode.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#14As a technical person I agree with a lot of this article. We were moving towards a data centric web for a while but now we're moving towards one where form is more important than function.
But with that said, I would have liked to have seen an article about accessibility have more talk about how the web is not only less accessible now for regular users but also even less accessible than it was before for people with disabilities such as blindness, color blindness, and even hearing loss.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#15> Today, we are so far from that initial vision of linking documents to share knowledge that it's hard to simply browse the web for information without constantly being asked to buy something, like something, follow someone, share the page on Facebook or sign up to some newsletter.
I'm a non-user of all things social media. My Twitter account is purely nominal (for pinging company support), and I don't have a Facebook account. As a business owner, my peers think it's bizarre that I don't have a LinkedIn account. The problems this author talks about are chains of our own making. Yes, corporations exploit us, but they exploit human frailties. This problem will not go away, and more "open tech" will not solve it.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#16This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…
I'm with you on this. Honestly at this point, if the information is only contained within a video, I skip it and move on[1]. (I usually leave video in the browser crippled, only turning it on when I actually want to watch something.)
[1] The trend of support docs for enterprise software going video is horrible, stupid, and a negative mark when I'm evaluating products. If someone has to spend hours of eyebleed rewinding some bullshit video over and over while writing actually usable documentation for incident response, of course that cost is part of the cost of the product in question.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#17-
If that's NSFW for you, you need a new W
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#18-
I'm going to assume that this is a joke.
Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#19Re: Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
#20This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…
Apart from the normal Facebook detractors, this is big part of why I deactivated my account. 95% of content on facebook is now in video format. Aside from the reasons you mentioned, it's also a huge drain on battery and slows the responsiveness of the site down considerably.
If I want to see videos, I'll go to youtube or vimeo. Don't force them on me when I'm trying to find quick info.