Using the modern web doesn't feel empowering. It feels immensely frustrating.
The web is barely usable without ad-blocking. Pages take an age to load and the content jumps around as more ads download and display. Also the ads are spying on you.
The entire JS ecosystem is dependency hell and sometimes you have to download massive JS files just to view a web page. The JS is probably also spying on you.
Worse still, JS is also probably why the Back button doesn't work properly on so many sites.
It feels like frontend engineers and web designers do their hardest work to make the whole experience of browsing the web completely miserable.
Why can't I open some embedded YouTube videos in full-screen? Why can't I just click Back when I want to go back without breaking the entire page? Why is this video playing by itself when I didn't ask it to?
Who are the people designing these completely terrible experiences? What happened to them? Who hurt them?!
Not to mention GDPR requests for consent, which frequently use dark UI patterns to make it obtusely difficult to opt out of tracking and advertising cookies.
Happy with being tracked? Sure, just click this "Accept" button.
Don't want to be tracked? Here, uncheck these 412 checkboxes by hand listing everywhere we might sell your data to.
... Seriously? Watch as I close this tab and never revisit your site.
Same goes for hiding content under "please don't ad-block" dialogs. Leave. Me. Alone.
@neilalexander Just got a page today which, when I pressed "Escape" (accidentally – but yes, I sure wanted to escape that) assumed I didn't consent (Yeah! Good guess) and informed me that, in that case, they couldn't show me the content (which I had already read before activating JS to be able to use their menu). WTF. Violates GDPR for the dependency.
Hint: In many cases, I found "Reading Mode" is a good way out.
@daniel_bohrer @neilalexander for that part, there are uBlock Origin and uMatrix. But admittedly, some pages simply don't even show a single letter without you permitting it at least some of that JS crap. Such sites I usually avoid completely.
@daniel_bohrer @neilalexander For me (and that's how I hadle it on my sites) a page must load even if JS is unavailable/blocked. Limited use for additional features is fine, but mustn't be mandatory. All essential information should be accessible without.
@IzzyOnDroid @neilalexander oh yes, reading mode also often makes these cookie warnings go away without needing to click "accept" :) however, you still have to load the whole page first, including js, or the browser won't show you the reading mode icon :-/