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> Don't roll your own page scrolling. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own link navigation. browser should not even let

> Don't roll your own page scrolling. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own link navigation. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own text selection. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own copy and paste. browser should not even let the page see this action I'm serious. WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it - we users must already be free to do with the content as we please

vitally3643 5mo ago
It should be illegal for a website to hijack text copying, right clicking, or keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl*f.
- VladVladikoff 5mo ago
  No. There are already too many batshit insane laws trying to regulate the internet. We need less, not more.
  - equinoxnemesis 5mo ago
    Indeed, people talk about technical solutions to social problems but there is also such a thing as trying a legal solution for a technical problem.
js2 5mo ago
All of these annoyances and more can be blocked by StopTheMadness (available for iOS and macOS): https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/ https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/
- orhmeh09 5mo ago
  This is one of the most useful programs I use every day. Works in Firefox too
- NooneAtAll3 5mo ago
  > Sold separately aaaand you lost my interest the moment money got involved all these things are already fixable by browser extensions - what is lacking is exposing that in browser options and even making it the default
  - latexr 5mo ago
    > all these things are already fixable by browser extensions Which is what StopTheMadness is and does.
  - ladberg 5mo ago
    Do you not believe developers should be paid for the work they do? And if not, what do you think the majority of people on this forum do?
    - jason_oster 5mo ago
      Not the GP, but to me this case feels like extortion. I have the same problem with paying for extensions like Dark Reader, DeArrow, and any ad blockers. None of these apps should exist in the first place. They were created because the default state of the web is barbaric. And some developers have the gall to charge for the luxury of making the experience tolerable? And yet, I've paid for every one of these.
      - iainmerrick 5mo ago
        Write your own extension, then, and make it cheaper than the others -- or free!
        paulryanrogers 5mo ago
        I think their point is the answer to a problem a gapping wound isn't cheaper or even free bandaids. We already have regulations for accessibility and advertising. Yet they're weak in the US and rarely enforced.
bigstrat2003 5mo ago
Also: Javascript should not be able to touch the browser history. I know it's useful for some apps. But it's too prone to abuse and that API should be revoked.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo ago
  my main argument against this has been reading books I don't enjoy needing to "go back" 100 times, once for each page of the book just to return to f.e. search results I opened the book from
incr_me 5mo ago
Because the web browser was burdened with the role of application host, and not just presentation of static content. There's no going backwards.
- trueno 5mo ago
  this is why the web stack feels like a car held together with duct tape these days. we collectively took the wrong fork in the road and doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down. computing in general is glorious when i feel like im working near computing and then i get to web app stuff and im like.. i dunno. sad. i get why we ended up where we did with web stacks but seriously what a nightmare
  - omnimus 5mo ago
    It's not a nightmare. It's the most popular gui/document/app platform for a reason. It's complex because it has to cater to many types of usecases. Name one platform that's better. I think people have tried and some might have even succeeded in limited slice of what web can do. I have strong suspicion that it's exactly because of the “document” history why web is so approachable to creators, why there is “view source” and ultimately why you can hop from simple html blog, to CRUD app, to advanced CAD software.
- jay_kyburz 5mo ago
  rss
msla 5mo ago
> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? Because the alternative is UI/UX Designers and Visionary Managers insisting on keeping Flash and Java Applets and Microsoft Visual Silverlight .Net++ around forever, because you can't do some things in the browser and We Need To Do Them. Some things have minimal complexity that either lives in the language itself or in libraries. The Web has minimal bells and whistles that are either implemented in the browsers itself or in plugins.
- king_geedorah 5mo ago
  Nobody “needed” the web to do these things. We decided that the effort and cost of making native applications was too great. I’d argue we went the wrong way given that even the same browser will exhibit slightly different behavior depending upon the underlying platform upon which it runs.
andai 5mo ago
I found that most internet pages are greatly enhanced by disabling JavaScript in my web browser.
- Shellban 5mo ago
  It depends. A lot of websites refuse to display some stuff without JavaScript, and of course online payments insist on JavaScript (to the point that trying to push through without it can result in strange errors and potential double-charges as you troubleshoot).
- NooneAtAll3 5mo ago
  total disabling of JS is overkill I mean, I'm all for for switching to Lua or smth (which is a slightly different anti-JS camp than yours), but the problem isn't in interactive (or even non-frozen) pages in general - it's in pages reading user actions that user doesn't expect/want to
  - andai 5mo ago
    And fingerprinting the user, and spying on their behavior, and showing them crap, and wasting their battery, and wasting their bandwidth, and...
GolfPopper 5mo ago
>WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it - we users must already be free to do with the content as we please Because on the modern web, the user is the content, sold to the highest bidder.
manoDev 5mo ago
Javascript was a mistake.
crq-yml 5mo ago
The Web is an ads platform with useful functionality as bait. That's all there really is to it: Mosaic added image support. Investors got excited and asked if the images could animate, if they could record click data and credit card data, if they could add video and additional presentational elements. Holistic user experiences were secondary. To move forward we have to accept that most of this wasn't an accident and it needs some breaking changes.
jakevoytko 5mo ago
Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available. We had Google Docs that didn’t roll-your-own for each of the items in that list and it was called Writely and it was absolute dogshit (but super cool for its time) because those limitations were too extreme. And by extension it wouldn’t make sense to have Chromebooks as a category of hardware, because web software could never compete at a feature parity level with native software.
- BrenBarn 5mo ago
  I would rather not have Google Docs than have all the other crap that comes along with allowing every website to do stuff that Google Docs "needs".
- at_compile_time 5mo ago
  Seems like exactly the kind of thing permissions are for.
  - jakevoytko 5mo ago
    That is indeed how things like copy/paste through the menus already work; you install an extension to get the clipboard permission or the browser limits you to keyboard shortcuts
- tiltowait 5mo ago
  > Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available. I was already in favor of banning it. You don't have to keep trying to convince me. Okay, snark off. But as someone who dislikes the proliferation of "web apps", I'd be perfectly happy to see Google Docs and others die off if it meant we moved back to real, locally run applications.
  - poisonborz 5mo ago
    To the walled garden app stores? On most platforms web is the only uncensored way to deliver apps.
tecoholic 5mo ago
> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it Nope we haven’t. At least not in a web application. At least not since the days Infinite Scrolling was invented. IIRC Twitter, for eg, only renders a partial list depending on the scroll position. I once wrote a NER tagger, where implementing custom text selection allowed users to not stress about selecting the exact word boundaries when manually tagging 1000s of words per day. I can probably find legitimate use cases for almost of these things in the list. While I agree with the broader theme of the article, this idea that the user agent should be a dumb display is not valid.
wasmperson 5mo ago
> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? scrolling: used by games, maps, image viewers link navigation: used for client-side routing (youtube/twitch, any website with a chat window) text selection and copy/paste: word processors, spreadsheet editors, forum software, etc. I'm not sure if your question was sincere or if you were trying to say that the web should not support these use cases.
- gyomu 5mo ago
  Yes, you get to the heart of the problem - we turned what started of as a document viewer into a general purpose application platform. Features paramount in a document viewer (broadly, "respect the user's local document viewing preferences") aren't desirable in a general purpose application platform. A large number of companies/web developers don't think of themselves as offering the user a document to view on their own terms, but rather an "experience" that they want full control over (which means, most of the time: show ads and record user behavior). If you're offering me a game, fair enough. But if you're showing me my hotel reservation or electric bill, I want a document, not an ""experience"".
  - kevmo314 5mo ago
    Management wants you to want to have an experience.
    - worthless-trash 5mo ago
      nobody asked management.
      - dag100 5mo ago
        And management asked nobody, and then did it anyway. Your preferences are unusual. Most people either don't care or prefer flashiness over consistency. It's something I've come to realise about the why the world is the way it is. Yes, to a certain extent it is because of locally maximal power structures and hierarchies propagating - but it is also because, taken as a whole, people are really just like that. A single politician may be corrupt, but that does not mean that most people, if taking their place, would not be as or more corrupt. Management sucks, yes - but that doesn't mean that most engineers who become managers wouldn't act the same way. You and I may prefer consistency over flashiness, but the majority of the world couldn't care less. So flashiness and "experiences" win.
kazinator 5mo ago
Desktop envy: so you could create certain desktop-like interactions.

vitally3643 5mo ago

It should be illegal for a website to hijack text copying, right clicking, or keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl*f.

VladVladikoff 5mo ago
No. There are already too many batshit insane laws trying to regulate the internet. We need less, not more.
- equinoxnemesis 5mo ago
  Indeed, people talk about technical solutions to social problems but there is also such a thing as trying a legal solution for a technical problem.

js2 5mo ago

All of these annoyances and more can be blocked by StopTheMadness (available for iOS and macOS): https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/ https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

orhmeh09 5mo ago
This is one of the most useful programs I use every day. Works in Firefox too
NooneAtAll3 5mo ago
> Sold separately aaaand you lost my interest the moment money got involved all these things are already fixable by browser extensions - what is lacking is exposing that in browser options and even making it the default
- latexr 5mo ago
  > all these things are already fixable by browser extensions Which is what StopTheMadness is and does.
- ladberg 5mo ago
  Do you not believe developers should be paid for the work they do? And if not, what do you think the majority of people on this forum do?
  - jason_oster 5mo ago
    Not the GP, but to me this case feels like extortion. I have the same problem with paying for extensions like Dark Reader, DeArrow, and any ad blockers. None of these apps should exist in the first place. They were created because the default state of the web is barbaric. And some developers have the gall to charge for the luxury of making the experience tolerable? And yet, I've paid for every one of these.
    - iainmerrick 5mo ago
      Write your own extension, then, and make it cheaper than the others -- or free!
      - paulryanrogers 5mo ago
        I think their point is the answer to a problem a gapping wound isn't cheaper or even free bandaids. We already have regulations for accessibility and advertising. Yet they're weak in the US and rarely enforced.

bigstrat2003 5mo ago

Also: Javascript should not be able to touch the browser history. I know it's useful for some apps. But it's too prone to abuse and that API should be revoked.

NooneAtAll3 5mo ago
my main argument against this has been reading books I don't enjoy needing to "go back" 100 times, once for each page of the book just to return to f.e. search results I opened the book from

incr_me 5mo ago

Because the web browser was burdened with the role of application host, and not just presentation of static content. There's no going backwards.

trueno 5mo ago
this is why the web stack feels like a car held together with duct tape these days. we collectively took the wrong fork in the road and doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down. computing in general is glorious when i feel like im working near computing and then i get to web app stuff and im like.. i dunno. sad. i get why we ended up where we did with web stacks but seriously what a nightmare
- omnimus 5mo ago
  It's not a nightmare. It's the most popular gui/document/app platform for a reason. It's complex because it has to cater to many types of usecases. Name one platform that's better. I think people have tried and some might have even succeeded in limited slice of what web can do. I have strong suspicion that it's exactly because of the “document” history why web is so approachable to creators, why there is “view source” and ultimately why you can hop from simple html blog, to CRUD app, to advanced CAD software.
jay_kyburz 5mo ago
rss

msla 5mo ago

> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? Because the alternative is UI/UX Designers and Visionary Managers insisting on keeping Flash and Java Applets and Microsoft Visual Silverlight .Net++ around forever, because you can't do some things in the browser and We Need To Do Them. Some things have minimal complexity that either lives in the language itself or in libraries. The Web has minimal bells and whistles that are either implemented in the browsers itself or in plugins.

king_geedorah 5mo ago
Nobody “needed” the web to do these things. We decided that the effort and cost of making native applications was too great. I’d argue we went the wrong way given that even the same browser will exhibit slightly different behavior depending upon the underlying platform upon which it runs.

andai 5mo ago

I found that most internet pages are greatly enhanced by disabling JavaScript in my web browser.

Shellban 5mo ago
It depends. A lot of websites refuse to display some stuff without JavaScript, and of course online payments insist on JavaScript (to the point that trying to push through without it can result in strange errors and potential double-charges as you troubleshoot).
NooneAtAll3 5mo ago
total disabling of JS is overkill I mean, I'm all for for switching to Lua or smth (which is a slightly different anti-JS camp than yours), but the problem isn't in interactive (or even non-frozen) pages in general - it's in pages reading user actions that user doesn't expect/want to
- andai 5mo ago
  And fingerprinting the user, and spying on their behavior, and showing them crap, and wasting their battery, and wasting their bandwidth, and...

GolfPopper 5mo ago

>WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it - we users must already be free to do with the content as we please Because on the modern web, the user is the content, sold to the highest bidder.

manoDev 5mo ago

Javascript was a mistake.

crq-yml 5mo ago

The Web is an ads platform with useful functionality as bait. That's all there really is to it: Mosaic added image support. Investors got excited and asked if the images could animate, if they could record click data and credit card data, if they could add video and additional presentational elements. Holistic user experiences were secondary. To move forward we have to accept that most of this wasn't an accident and it needs some breaking changes.

jakevoytko 5mo ago

Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available. We had Google Docs that didn’t roll-your-own for each of the items in that list and it was called Writely and it was absolute dogshit (but super cool for its time) because those limitations were too extreme. And by extension it wouldn’t make sense to have Chromebooks as a category of hardware, because web software could never compete at a feature parity level with native software.

BrenBarn 5mo ago
I would rather not have Google Docs than have all the other crap that comes along with allowing every website to do stuff that Google Docs "needs".
at_compile_time 5mo ago
Seems like exactly the kind of thing permissions are for.
- jakevoytko 5mo ago
  That is indeed how things like copy/paste through the menus already work; you install an extension to get the clipboard permission or the browser limits you to keyboard shortcuts
tiltowait 5mo ago
> Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available. I was already in favor of banning it. You don't have to keep trying to convince me. Okay, snark off. But as someone who dislikes the proliferation of "web apps", I'd be perfectly happy to see Google Docs and others die off if it meant we moved back to real, locally run applications.
- poisonborz 5mo ago
  To the walled garden app stores? On most platforms web is the only uncensored way to deliver apps.

tecoholic 5mo ago

> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it Nope we haven’t. At least not in a web application. At least not since the days Infinite Scrolling was invented. IIRC Twitter, for eg, only renders a partial list depending on the scroll position. I once wrote a NER tagger, where implementing custom text selection allowed users to not stress about selecting the exact word boundaries when manually tagging 1000s of words per day. I can probably find legitimate use cases for almost of these things in the list. While I agree with the broader theme of the article, this idea that the user agent should be a dumb display is not valid.

wasmperson 5mo ago

> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? scrolling: used by games, maps, image viewers link navigation: used for client-side routing (youtube/twitch, any website with a chat window) text selection and copy/paste: word processors, spreadsheet editors, forum software, etc. I'm not sure if your question was sincere or if you were trying to say that the web should not support these use cases.

gyomu 5mo ago
Yes, you get to the heart of the problem - we turned what started of as a document viewer into a general purpose application platform. Features paramount in a document viewer (broadly, "respect the user's local document viewing preferences") aren't desirable in a general purpose application platform. A large number of companies/web developers don't think of themselves as offering the user a document to view on their own terms, but rather an "experience" that they want full control over (which means, most of the time: show ads and record user behavior). If you're offering me a game, fair enough. But if you're showing me my hotel reservation or electric bill, I want a document, not an ""experience"".
- kevmo314 5mo ago
  Management wants you to want to have an experience.
  - worthless-trash 5mo ago
    nobody asked management.
    - dag100 5mo ago
      And management asked nobody, and then did it anyway. Your preferences are unusual. Most people either don't care or prefer flashiness over consistency. It's something I've come to realise about the why the world is the way it is. Yes, to a certain extent it is because of locally maximal power structures and hierarchies propagating - but it is also because, taken as a whole, people are really just like that. A single politician may be corrupt, but that does not mean that most people, if taking their place, would not be as or more corrupt. Management sucks, yes - but that doesn't mean that most engineers who become managers wouldn't act the same way. You and I may prefer consistency over flashiness, but the majority of the world couldn't care less. So flashiness and "experiences" win.

kazinator 5mo ago

Desktop envy: so you could create certain desktop-like interactions.