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569 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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hackingonempty ◴[] No.42599363[source]
> I don't keep a "dick bar" that sticks to the top of the page to remind you which site you're on.

I use an extension called "Bar Breaker" that hides these when you scroll away from the top/bottom of the page.[0] More people should know about it.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bar-breaker/

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kerkeslager ◴[] No.42599856[source]
I am usually the first old man to yell at any cloud, and I was overjoyed when someone invented the word "enshittening" for me to describe how the internet has gotten, but it surprised me a bit that people found that one annoying. I can see the problem of it sticking the top of the page with a logo (which is basically an ad and I hate those), but they usually have a menu there, so I always thought of them a bit like the toolbar at the top of an application window in a native desktop application. FWIW when I've built those, I've always de-emphasized the branding and focused on making the menus obvious and accessible.

I'm happy to learn something new about other people's preferences, though. If people prefer scrolling to the top, so be it!

EDIT: It occurs to me that this could be a preference setting. A few of the websites that have let me have my way, I've started generating CSS from a Django template and adding configuration options to let users set variables like colors--with really positive feedback from disabled users. At a fundamental level, I think the solution to accessibility is often configurability, because people with different disabilities often need different, mutually incompatible accommodations.

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st-keller ◴[] No.42600788[source]
This is exactly what CSS was designed for: allowing you to define your personal style preferences in your browser, applying them across all websites. The term ‘cascading’ reflects this purpose.

Unfortunately, the web today has strayed far from its original vision. Yet, we continue to rely on the foundational technologies that were created for that very vision.

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ryandrake ◴[] No.42603022[source]
IMO browsers are broadly dropping the ball and failing to be "the user's agent." Instead they are the agents of web developers, giving them the powers that users should have.

If browsers catered to their user's desires more than they cater to developers, the web wouldn't be so shitty.

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1. kerkeslager ◴[] No.42607714[source]
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I think the beginning of the end was the invention of JavaScript. Pulling down an unknown chunk of code from the internet and running it is malware. Even if browsers successfully sandbox the JS (a promise which they've failed to keep numerous times) it can do all sorts of stuff that doesn't serve me, like mine crypto (theft of resources) or display ads (adware).

The primary benefit of web applications is they don't lose your data. Not a single web application UI that exists provides as good a user experience as the native desktop applications that came before. A web where browsers provided their own UIs for various document types, and those document types could not modify their UIs in any way, period, would be a better web. You serve up the document, I get to control how it looks and behaves.