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Why our website looks like an operating system

posthog.com

341–350 of 504 posts

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#341
post #3

I'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…)

Because browsers only remember the last set of open windows reliably.

So if I were to split the 5 tabs I usually need for work in 3 windows I would routinely lose a bunch of them.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#343
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EU law is just meritless pestering of people It is that. It has done literally nothing to improve anything whatsoever, in any country. And most of the "cookie management" scripts that people use, barely even work. Both the law and the way it's complied with in practice are a dumb solution to a problem that the EU should have forced browser vendors to solve. Only the user's browser can choose not to send back cookie…

The EU law is fine, the implementation used isn't. But never blame the EU laws for cookie banners; the law does not mandate banners at all, let alone the ones full of dark patterns to nag you into accepting anyway. That's all the industry. The industry could have come up with a standard, a browser add-on, respect a browser setting, etc but they chose the most annoying one to pester you, the user.

The EU law isn't fine.

Many websites are free because they survive from ads. Ads make more money if you collect data. The EU law essentially cut the revenue of all these websites. Their choice is to not collect data (meaning less revenue) or show a popup (meaning more bounce rate, which means less revenue).

People who think this is a good thing are being short-sighted. That's because this law mainly affects websites that host information that visitors visit from clicking on links on the web. If a website is like Facebook or Youtube, where users must sign up first or probably already have an account, they will be able to collect data for ads with or without banners since they have their own ToS for creating an account, and they can infer a lot from how the user uses their services.

I'm not saying privacy regulation is a bad thing. It made countless businesses reconsider how they handle people's data. But it's clear to me that there are two problems.

First, this regulation hurts all the small websites that need to exist in order for we have to have a healthy "web." A lot of these are making only barely their hosting costs in ads, so there is no way they can afford the counsel to figure out how to comply with laws from another continent. If we had another way to support these websites, this wouldn't be a problem, but ads are really the lifeblood of half of the internet, and almost nobody wants to donate or pay a subscription.

Second, this regulation doesn't even really protect people's private data in the end, which may give users a false sense of security because they have the GDPR on their side. I forgot the name, but there was a recent gossiping app that required the user to upload a photo in order to sign up, which should be deleted afterwards, but they never deleted it and when the app was hacked the attacker had access to photos of all users. It's the same thing with GDPR. We can tell when a website is clearly not complying with the GDPR, but there is no way to tell if they actually complied with the GDPR until the server gets hacked.

Even the way they comply with GDPR isn't enough to protect users' privacy, e.g. if you have an account on Discord and you want your data deleted, they will simply turn every post your made into an "anonymous" post. This means if you sent a message that discloses your private information on Discord, that will never get deleted because its outside the scope of compliance. You could literally say "Hi, my name is XYZ, I live in ABC" and they won't delete that because you consented to provide that information, they will just change your username from "xyz" to "anonymous" or something like that.

I still wonder what are the actual benefits of GDPR with these cookie banners when 99% of the users just stay on Facebook and Youtube anyway.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#344
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inv…

> The way it is right now feels like a net negative.

That's because the tracking is a net negative.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#345
post #34

So, in short, this is because window management under macOS sucks big time (and under Windows, still leaves much to be desired), and because tabs in Chrome become indistinguishable if you open a couple dozen, since they are on top, instead of on the side (Firefox only recently gained an option to put tabs on the side). Watch legacy UI concepts that are so ingrained that people often don't notice how counterproductive…

> Firefox only recently gained an option to put tabs on the side re gained. And I don't think it was a long break at all. tree organization for those side tabs, now that took a lot of time to regain, after they ripped API used by TreeStyleTabs extension.

If they indeed adopted Tree Style Tab, that is, allowed tabs to form a tree, that would be wonderful. Alas, I sill have to run TST and hide native tabs.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#346
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cookies are the easiest way to keep track of a user, but if browsers regularly stop sending cookies then website operators will just find another method to fingerprint users and then we're back to square one with the law still requiring publishers to receive opt-in approval, but with no requirements on how.

> then website operators will just find another method to fingerprint users Example: The identifier you get when you pass anti-bot challenges (Cloudflare, Anubis, etc).

That's not a cookie?

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#347
I would give anything to have a linux window manager that looks and behaves just like this. I said this to my coworkers in slack and they said that my age is showing, which is probably true. everything on this website is so easy to find, it just feels good. icons and color scheme is perfect as well.

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#348
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If they indeed only use the cookie for essential functionality, this kind of joke banner only makes their choice to respect visitors' privacy equally annoying. Even worse: because it makes it seem like the EU law is just meritless pestering of people, they are actually fighting for the right for worse sites to spy on their visitors. It's baffling.

> EU law is just meritless pestering of people It is that. It has done literally nothing to improve anything whatsoever, in any country. And most of the "cookie management" scripts that people use, barely even work. Both the law and the way it's complied with in practice are a dumb solution to a problem that the EU should have forced browser vendors to solve. Only the user's browser can choose not to send back cookie…

No, it is not that. It highlighted an issue, and it makes it painfully obvious when a particular page is being extra ignorant about your privacy and trying to sell it to thousand vendors instead of a handful.

What I don't like about cookie popups isn't the popup (which isn't something the EU law dictated btw), it's that someone thought it was okay to have hundreds of advertisement vendors and data brokers on a single news article, and it's better to know so I can just close the tab and never interact with that webpage again if they're being excessive asshats.

They have failed at enforcing this properly though, in particular with the recent proliferation of "legitimate interest" abuse (it is only legitimate interest if it an implied component to a service I am directly requesting), and the general issue of popups illegally making rejection different from acceptance, intentionally making rejection slow, or even requiring payment to continue without cookies. And yes, the occasionally completely defective prompt.

I do agree that it would be neater if the browser handled this though. Would also be neater if the internet wasn't entirely sponsored by privacy violations. :/

Re: Why our website looks like an operating system

#350
post #179
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yep, it baffles me that a lot of people would rather not have the option to reject cookies. Back in the day browsers offered this natively. When the advertising companies started building browsers there was a lot of incentive to see that go by the wayside of course... But the earlier comment isn't saying that you shouldn't have options, rather that the law needs to be more specific, such as requiring browsers to wo…

> that the law needs to be more specific, such as requiring browsers to work in coordination with website operators 1. The law isn't about browsers or websites. It equally applies to all tracking. E.g. in apps. Or in physical stores. 2. The world's largest advertising company could do all you describe. And they do work with websites. First by repackaging tracking through FLoC. Then by just simply repackaging tracking…

> It equally applies to all tracking. E.g. in apps. Or in physical stores.

Obviously. And where there are problems in those domains equal specificity would be asked for. But since we're talking about in the context of browsers specifically...

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