While cute, that cookie banner isn't actually required if you aren't doing any tracking. This is the common misconception a lot of people have with the cookie banners -- its not required, it is a confession from a website.
Why our website looks like an operating system
251–260 of 504 posts
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're honor system, which is dumb when you could have browsers not send that data back without opt-in. Given that there is no objective way to differentiate between functional and tracking cookies, your "technical" solution would also boil down to honoring marking certain cookies as such by the website owner, effectively being the same as what we have today. (Though I do agree that the UX would be nicer this way)
Well, I mean, we could go the route Safari has, and just blanket-disable 3rd party cookies by default. It's... quite effective (if a tad annoying for folks implementing single-sign-on)
I don't know, I don't think it helps all that much when you are up against Facebook's, and Google's wits on how to circumvent it.
If they can open a port and side-step the security system of Android wholesale, they can probably find a "solution" to the not even that hard of a problem of doing tracking server-side.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#253Why this feels so incredibly appealing compared to prevailing designs is probably something for a psychologist / cognitive scientist / neurologist (?) to answer -- there is certainly something here that warrants better study than what we in the software industry do in rushed blog posts. But I can personally speak to at least one aspect, having worked for a company that does high end web sites and strategy for large S…
This is definitely a surprising opinion to find on HN. Usually the prevailing thought is that anything that is even remotely heavy on JavaScript is bad design and therefore inherently unusable, unportable, etc. Whereas this is essentially JavaScript maximalism.
I think it depends. I basically see the web as two parts, "web documents" (usually called "websites") and "web apps" (usually just called apps), and it makes sense that web apps that require lots of interactivity (think drag and drop) would use lots of JavaScript, I don't people have a problem with image editors or map viewers being made more simple by the use of JS for example.
The friction occurs when people building a website for web documents think they should be building a web app, so you end up with a scaffolding that requires heavy JS just to serve what essentially is just text + maybe one or two images. The additional JS doesn't really save the user any time or pain, it just makes everything larger and harder to consume.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#254Nice idea, awesome implementation, but please no. I now need to learn a new UI and UX, I have to to organize windows inside my windows. I want websites to be more like a block of text rather than a super fancy interface.
It would be one impressively long block of text if you tried to put all of this page's content in it.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you like things the way they were before the law, just answer yes to all cookie banners you see. It does not take time if you don’t care to read it. Yours click yes, and they will remember you want to be tracked.
That’s in theory. In practice these banners regularly break. They are hard to click on certain devices where the button is off screen. If they use JavaScript and there is an error elsewhere, you can’t hide them. And I regularly see them over and over again on the same sites because for some reason they can’t track me effectively for this purpose. In short they are a regular minor annoyance that does take time and eff…
Seems like it's working then? Because the website chose to (optionally) track you, you need to go through a minor annoyance to accept it. You're effectively making a choice that you're fine with this annoyance (since you keep using the website) and since you're accepting it, you're fine with being tracked.
Other people already get two choices to make here which they didn't get before, which is a win in my book. Seeing the banner, you can decide to avoid the website and if you still wanna use the website, you can chose if you allow them to track you by PII or not.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#256This reminds me of how the web was decade(s?) ago. Reminds me of Jeffrey Zeldman's work. Love it
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads industry did that. Was it worth it?
The ads industry isn’t in the business of making our lives easier. EU lawmakers are. Which is why it’s the EU that is failing in its mission here.
> The ads industry isn’t in the business of making our lives easier.
Indeed. So somehow you still end up blaming the EU.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s in theory. In practice these banners regularly break. They are hard to click on certain devices where the button is off screen. If they use JavaScript and there is an error elsewhere, you can’t hide them. And I regularly see them over and over again on the same sites because for some reason they can’t track me effectively for this purpose. In short they are a regular minor annoyance that does take time and eff…
Seems like it's working then? Because the website chose to (optionally) track you, you need to go through a minor annoyance to accept it. You're effectively making a choice that you're fine with this annoyance (since you keep using the website) and since you're accepting it, you're fine with being tracked. Other people already get two choices to make here which they didn't get before, which is a win in my book. Seein…
I get the choice, but I make the choice I like less because it is more convenient to make it. If we only look at the positives, then the situation is better. But we have to look at the cost, and there is a cost, in terms of time and mental effort, to read the banner, figure out what the choices are, and if I am not accepting all cookies, how to go through the process of rejecting some of them. Sometimes it's very involved.
Also, I am an educated consumer and understand what a cookie is. Most people do not and do whatever is necessary to make the consent screen go away. Because of that, effectively they don't get this choice.
As one of the parent posts said, if it was implemented on the browser level, I would get the choice, and the cost of making the right choice would be smaller. If the defaults were to "reject unnecessary cookies" then most of the population would get the benefit.
The way it is right now feels like a net negative. Most people don't know what the consent is about and will not spend the time to learn it. Companies still find ways to track you that agrees with the letter but not the spirit of the law. I have friction whenever visiting a new website (or an old one that forgot my choice). The only winners are people who don't value their time and are smart enough to understand cookie consent. That's a small percentage of the general population.
Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#259I've always thought ‘multi-document interfaces’ as we used to call them are an anti-pattern. I have a perfectly good window manager; why does every app need its own incompatible, usually inferior window manager built in? (Mind you on mobile I very much don't have a perfectly good window manager, and indeed can't even open multiple instances of most apps…)
To throw gasoline on the fire: this how I’ve always felt about tmux. Why use an incomplete in terminal windowing system when I can just have multiple terminal windows open managed by the superior OS window system. (That said I know tmux is sometimes the only option and then it makes sense to me)
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Re: Why our website looks like an operating system
#260It's neat but it runs like a dog. I opened a couple of things and tried to move the window... I'd take a statically generated bunch of webpages over this. If you're going to make one of those multi window webpages looking thing, make it good. To note, in the past, this was a big no-no because SEO was important. You had to have good SEO for search engines to index your content efficiently and show up well ranked in se…
Firefox?
I had the same issue then tried edge and it was smooth.