Browsers should be designed from the start for the benefit of the users. There are too many “features” that only benefit the server owners. It’s been this way for a long time. Like the “Referer” header. Old as dirt, but how do I benefit from telling a server what page I was visiting beforehand?
I think the referrer header was originally meant for internal redirects within a website. Like you click on the add comment button but you’re not signed in, and after signing in the website can use the referrer to bring you back to the page you were on. Also useful for old school HTML form submissions that take you to the submission endpoint and then has to bring you back.
But early browser devs just didn’t have cross site isolation in mind (you can tell because when JS first came out, you could literally use it to take control of an iframe loaded by your page regardless of what domain the iframe was on) so tracking companies took advantage of that and now they think they’re entitled to it continuing to work that way because “it was always like that.”
Yeah, this has been my thought ever since the first time I saw javascript that disabled right click. There were workarounds, but I thought the browser shouldn’t even try to cooperate with something like that.
These days, it’s sites that disable scrolling. Sure, I can fuck with the css to enable it again, but it should be a menu option or just not something that can be disabled in css or via js.
Same for all of the other metrics that browsers send in the headers. Even though it’s nice to see stats on OS use and such, why does a server need to know which one I’m using? Even for screen resolution, while you could say that it affects how the page should be rendered, I’d prefer a standardized bug reporting mechanism for letting webmasters know when their page is broken for a certain resolution and otherwise letting the browser handle the rendering. And if it means the death of sites that cover their page in images to make a fancy layout, tbh good riddance.
Browsers should be designed from the start for the benefit of the users. There are too many “features” that only benefit the server owners. It’s been this way for a long time. Like the “Referer” header. Old as dirt, but how do I benefit from telling a server what page I was visiting beforehand?
I think the referrer header was originally meant for internal redirects within a website. Like you click on the add comment button but you’re not signed in, and after signing in the website can use the referrer to bring you back to the page you were on. Also useful for old school HTML form submissions that take you to the submission endpoint and then has to bring you back.
But early browser devs just didn’t have cross site isolation in mind (you can tell because when JS first came out, you could literally use it to take control of an iframe loaded by your page regardless of what domain the iframe was on) so tracking companies took advantage of that and now they think they’re entitled to it continuing to work that way because “it was always like that.”
Yeah, this has been my thought ever since the first time I saw javascript that disabled right click. There were workarounds, but I thought the browser shouldn’t even try to cooperate with something like that.
These days, it’s sites that disable scrolling. Sure, I can fuck with the css to enable it again, but it should be a menu option or just not something that can be disabled in css or via js.
Same for all of the other metrics that browsers send in the headers. Even though it’s nice to see stats on OS use and such, why does a server need to know which one I’m using? Even for screen resolution, while you could say that it affects how the page should be rendered, I’d prefer a standardized bug reporting mechanism for letting webmasters know when their page is broken for a certain resolution and otherwise letting the browser handle the rendering. And if it means the death of sites that cover their page in images to make a fancy layout, tbh good riddance.