There seems to be an arms race between browser features to block obnoxious content and higher tech obnoxious content. If your web page makes my computer fan come on, something is seriously wrong.
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Quick, someone write a script that hijacks infinite scrolling while playing “Yakety Sax”.
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I voted in the municipal election today. The polling station was Thinkpads on wifi in the browser in kiosk mode. It had an “I am not a robot” box / pick the pictures that are traffic lights. The steaming turd on the shit cake was the follow up questionnaire from hell that… would… not… end…
Good god! If they do that again, so tempted to bring a rootkit USB drive next time.
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That’s there as a legal requirement.
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I’m tempted to write a browser extension that automatically fills in those newsletter forms appropriately (can_i_finish_reading_your_goddamn_page_first@domain.com).
Also one with a chatbot for those damn live agent chat windows.
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They missed the part where if you move the mouse up towards the address bar at all it displays a full page popup asking you to stick around
I was on a site today that had a pop-up that covered the accept button for the cookie disclaimer. You had to refresh before you could get into the site. Another one literally had 6 captcha verification windows. I didn’t realize I couldn’t recognize a street light or a store front. My fav is the drop down menu that closes before you can click the menu item.
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That seems so pathetic.
“No! Please don’r leave me! Even the Googlebot only visits once a week!”
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Related: Asking (begging?) me to join their mailing list before I’ve even read any content. Rude and needy. I won’t know that until I have some idea of the quality of your writing.
Oh, and I never subscribe to mailing lists.
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It has become much clearer that software, in general, works towards the goals of the people who paid the programmers, not the people who are using it. Code on the web is just one example, along with the software on my computer and the embedded code in the devices I own (or “own”).
Other aspects of this adversarial web design include opening links in a new tab, and making the trivially-false claim that PDF files can only be opened by Adobe Acrobat Reader. (That latter one is a common trope on shitty government sites, for some reason.)
Overdone help wanted ads in the page code.
<!––
0000000 000 0000000
111111111 11111111100 000 111111111
00000 111111111111111111 00000 000000
000 1111111111111111111111111100000 000
000 1111 1111111111111111100 000
000 11 0 1111111100 000
000 1 00 1 000
000 00 00 1 000
000 000 00000 1 000
00000 0000 00000000 1 00000
11111 000 00 000000 000 11111
00000 0000 000000 00000 00000
000 10000 000000 000 0000
000 00000 000000 1 000
000 000000 10000 1 0 000
000 1000000 00 1 00 000
000 1111111 1 0000 000
000 1111111100 000000 000
0000 111111111111111110000000 0000
111111111 111111111111100000 111111111
0000000 00000000 0000000
NYTimes.com: All the code that's fit to printf()
We're hiring: https://nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Tech
-->
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the heading page for the late great meg…
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Well, what’s the worst that could happen: you leave their website?
Pet peeve: news sites that tell me I’ve read my quota of articles this month…while continuing to barrage me weekly with emails containing links to more articles on their site!
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News sites whose pages have no body, but are constructed on the fly from Javascript, making it a total pain to do content analysis. YouTube is doing the same fucked-in-the-head garbage. (“You want the video date? Go fish the JSON out of our murky Javascript!”)
Case in point (use the source):
I mean, if the elements of the Javascript blackbox were standardized, that would be okay, but I know that there’s going to be eleventyzillion different ways of doing it. (Similar to how changing a Wordpress theme changes all the gorram page structure elements which have nothing to do with style or layout!)
Wasn’t this the whole point of going to HTML5, to get away from crapulent worse-than-tables customization like this?
eta: At least it has the Facebook OG fields to make OneBoxing work. I’ve learned to accept those, but I still twitch when I see a duplicate set of Twitter fields, and neither of them have the publication date.
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That is just laziness on the web page author to not declare a size for the pending advertisement/graphic.
That is precisely why I use Lynx (text based web browser) to view this “prohibited” content.
Lynx dosn’t load graphics, execute any scripts, and thanks to the ADA, are unable to block content.
(My other pet peeve is websites that complain about ad blocking, and I am using a stock browser on a mobile device.)
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And never come back…
The video should have shown a throbber to make you wait between each interaction:
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I just go to sites like that in my browser’s private mode. WaPo or NYT wants to restrict me to n articles a month? Joke’s on them!
