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> when the UA is, say, a screen-reader for a blind person? The blind person explicitly turns on blind mode. This is not a difficult problem. Trying to guess if
by unabst 9y ago
> when the UA is, say, a screen-reader for a blind person?
The blind person explicitly turns on blind mode. This is not a difficult problem. Trying to guess if the user is blind is a hard problem.
If the user wants bigger fonts, they can zoom. If font boosting is a feature they would like on, then have them turn it on. If the author makes a crappy page it should be on them. The best thing a browser could do is let them know. And to visitors, provide options. But instead, they automatically enable these secret brilliant features that break random things. These are not solutions. These are the cause of many problems.
Automatic login? Great. Have a button. Have a feature. Don't do it in the background. Just let me tell you what I want. And let the page authors embrace those features and tailor them, and not wind up hacking them to tame their functionality.
- deburo 9y agoThe author suggested having a standard browser UI for login. The website would only support it. Am I misunderstanding their intent? I don't see the problem here.
- deburo 9y agoThe author suggested having a standard browser UI for login. The website would only support it. Am I misunderstanding their intent? I don't see the problem here.
- deburo 9y agoThe author suggested having a standard browser UI for login. The website would only support it. Am I misunderstanding their intent? I don't see the problem here.
- derefr 9y agoI'm not talking about option-switches; I'm talking about purpose-built browsers or browser extensions, where using the browser was the choice you made to get these effects. If someone wants to develop what's essentially "automatic login, even for sites that would hate you if you did that: the browser", is that wrong? Hell, this is essentially the same argument as the one behind ad-blocking. If someone wants to build a browser that—by default—alters your page to remove ads (surprise: someone does!), and people want to use that browser (probably: everyone), I don't think you have the moral high ground to tell them to stop. Sure, you might be able to at least insist that they do some sort of feature-negotiation, where they tell you (maybe with feature-headers? a piece-wise replacement for UA-string heuristics, how lovely) what they're going to do to the page, and your server can then choose to do things like just not serving pages to people who have {font boosting, ad-blockers, etc.}; or redirecting to a page telling them their browser is bad and they should feel bad.
- unabst 9y ago> feature-negotiation It's words like these. We should not be looking to negotiate with anyone -- not as an author, and not as a consumer. If someone builds an auto-login browser, or an auto-login feature, then fine. But when Mozilla decides to put this in by default without telling everyone, then not fine. If font boosting was part of some cross browser mobile web standard then fine. But if you're Google and it's a feature specific for your browser, and you turn it on be default, then not fine. Of course, it seems like the premise is always that your feature can do no harm. But in practice it's always the opposite. There are always edge cases where something is broken or not right, that leads to these features as a cause. Login is actually extremely important. To tamper with the behavior of the browser when it comes to logins, and to do it automatically, seems extremely dangerous. But either way, it's about communication, not negotiation. If the user wants to turn it on, great. If the author turns it on, great. If no one turns it on, but the browser developer just "thinks it's a good idea" for every site ever built, then not great.