Live data from Hacker News

Things you can do with a browser in 2020

github.com

281–290 of 387 posts

Re: Things you can do with a browser in 2020

#281
post #6

Worth noting is that "prefers-color-scheme" works in all major OSes at this point, mobile and desktop. If your site already has a dark theme, there is no reason at all not to be integrating it this way. Even if you don't have a dark theme already, it's a huge value-add..... (@dang?)

It's funny to me that dark themes seem to be the preferred theme type in online discussions, because in practice, most people I know prefer a light theme on a monitor set to high contrast and relatively low brightness in a well lit setting. I too prefer that, as it seems to reduce (eliminate?) my eyestrain after hours on the computer.

> in a well lit setting

I think that's the key point there. Light themes are good in light, but bad in dark situations, and vice versa. "Most" people prefer light, because they use their computer mostly in the light. Many programmers etc. prefer dark because they use their computers late in the dark a lot.

These are basically two "modes" of use, but software has been treating this as a preference, rather than a mode switch.

Through a set up of PowerShell/Bash scripts, I now have global dark/light mode switches on all my devices and I feel like this is the first time I can really use them effectively in all situations. Light when there's light, dark when there isn't. I even switch on the train as it goes through a tunnel. IMO, this is how it should be used, not as a set-and-forget preference.

Re: Things you can do with a browser in 2020

#283
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's one good use case for Push Notifications. It would take about 10 minutes of browsing to find 10 bad ones.

I never liked the idea until I started using a browser based pomodoro timer and I enabled the desktop notifications, it's been a useful feature. Now, I'm wondering if there are other benefits I've been missing out on since I have always disabled desktop notifications by default.

Implementing notifications for a timer clock should be included in the wikipedia article about feature creep.

Not minding them too much since I disable them, but at some point it is just not worth it for all the anti-user practices notifications already allowed in my opinion. It just inflates functionality.

In 20 years, if we have even more powerful devices, we will complain about browsers taking ages to load again.

Re: Things you can do with a browser in 2020

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the idiotic downvotes, you are absolutely right. Browsers are terrible. No other applications or OS components are so monolithic expose the same attack surface.

What? Running a native desktop app exposes a much larger attack surface than opening a webpage.

what about the software that opens that web page?

Re: Things you can do with a browser in 2020

#286
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI on Chrome/Brave Android, when you use 'share' button -> copy URL, it uses link rel=canonical meta tag if available (which generally doesn't have all FB tracking crap in the URL etc.) Much better than directly copying the URL.

Or you could just trim the URL yourself.

The problem on mobile devices is that URL bar is single-line and has like 30 characters length and , while query string crap is sometimes several hundreds characters long. It's not every ergonomic.

But yeah I often copy the URL to "notepad" app before sharing and trim manually.

Re: Things you can do with a browser in 2020

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron embeds a HTML-render + JS-engine != web browser

Electron is essentially just a version of chrome. If electron can do it, chrome can do it, and there is no way to say that chrome is not a browser.

Electron is essentially just a version of Chromium, NOT Chrome.

Re: Things you can do with a browser in 2020

#289
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole security angle is an after-the-fact rationalization and the vast majority of users (not developers, users ) never cared much about it - as anyone in the IT department of pretty much every company can tell you (again, users, not developers, not sysops, not admins, but regular end users). The real reason we see so many web apps is that the decision on what technology to use for an application is largely somet…

Have you looked at the network traffic or behavior of most native apps? Continuous monitoring and cloud-based state are the norm everywhere, and for the same reasons.

Not all apps do that (in fact i cannot think of any desktop application that i have installed that does something like this - though if i could, it would get the boot) and because applications run locally it is possible to monitor and control their behavior (indeed, with a server you just don't know what is going on, but with a local app you can at least tell that something is going on).

Also, while the UI is far from ideal (at least on Windows), you can block individual applications from accessing the Internet. It should be much simpler than it is now, though.

Post reply on HN