161–170 of 574 posts
> Scroll anchoring keeps content from jumping as images and ads load at the top of the page That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out of your view due to…
At the end unless Firefox doesn't block JavaScript, it won't have much effect. Actually it's also time to ban JavaScript after horrendous front end frameworks made simple page loads slow, energy and time consuming.
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We'll probably just have to agree to disagree re: "JS does more harm than good". I have at least 5 progressive webapps open right now, none of which could work without javascript. Of the other 20 websites I have open in other tabs, none are being annoying or aggressive, and I'm not even using an adblocker.
They could be proper applications instead.
There's another alternative, which is curated and audited app stores à la iOS, but the fact that you can't use applications unless they're approved by a megacorporation would also be bad for people's computing autonomy.
(Also, what makes you think that the developers of bloated JS apps won't make bloated desktop apps?)
Whenever Firefox is automatically updated through my package manager, any open instances refuse to load any new pages or tabs until I restart Firefox . Needless to say, this is absolutely infuriating when I'm in the middle of something important. Does anyone know how to disable this feature?
Snap and Flatpak apps I think can do this as well, because they aren't stepping on the running binaries during the update. And you get the updated version when you relaunch.
Firefox isn't special in this regard. 100% of my applications on Windows and macOS expect to be quit before they can be updated, and is enforced either by the application, the OS, or the updater. I suspect that distro package managers don't really have a way to do an out of band update, all they can do is step all over in-use libraries and that inevitably causes the application to go a little crazy.
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They could be proper applications instead.
They are applications. They run in a safe sandbox in the browser, rather than being all-powerful programs running directly on the system. They allow nuances of trust ("I trust this application with the data I'm giving it") rather than absolute trust ("I trust this application with access to my entire system and all my data").
Why not just block the audio by default? I don't care about the video, because any hostile website could still generate video by using gifs, or by playing a sequence of image frames using JavaScript.
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Not really. It's way harder (and therefore the barrier is higher, they'd be less likely to exist, etc) to develop cross platform native applications than it is to just implement them as webapps. If it was just as easy to write and distribute native applications, we'd be doing that, instead of bolting it onto the web. But it's pretty clearly not.
Its the other way round. If web apps didnt exist, there would be more pressure to develop tools that make it easy to write and distribute proper applications.
I will bet you that in 99% of alternative timelines, we'd end up with something incredibly similar to what we've got today, and you'd still be complaining that applications aren't "native" enough, because practically nobody cares that a taskbar or button isn't a native OS component. They care that their application works, and can be quickly deployed and updated.
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Email clients, word processors and video chat would be very much possible without Javascript.
Email clients, sure. Word processors? Only if you're requiring something like Markdown. Video chat seems right out, unless you're permitting a Flash solution, which would be severely cheating.
Why not just block the audio by default? I don't care about the video, because any hostile website could still generate video by using gifs, or by playing a sequence of image frames using JavaScript.