Google simply can't knock off harrassing their users with security theatre.

A friend of mine has a small personal YouTube channel. He has recently been bombarded with several phone verification requests a week: "Verify it's you. To continue your session, complete a brief verification. This extra step helps us keep your account safe by making sure it’s really you. "

While frequent verifications may be understandable on YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, channels with only a few dozen subscribers are not attractive hacking targets. A verification would be justified before a potentially harmful action such as deleting videos or deleting a channel. But not for normal everyday use.

What's next? Will they ask users to "verify it's them" every ten minutes, "just for extra security"? Just to verify that it is "really, really, really, really, really" them?

It's not security. It's security theatre.

Sorry, Google, but users are not in the mood of doing a phone verification every other day.

Has this been Google's perverted wet dream all along?

As a lawmaker, I would ban smartphones thinner than ten millimetres (10 mm) so manufacturers are forced into building physically stronger smartphones with bigger and faster-charging batteries without having a competitive disadvantage.

Video: Your Smartphone is too thin. Here's why. https://youtube.com/watch/...

Poll (screenshot source): https://androidauthority.com/phone-...

For some reason, Google really, really, really wants to know peoples' phone numbers.

Of course, they say it is "only to protect us even more". But if the Twitter phone number misuse incident tells us anything, Google could change their mind at any time.

Around 2012, Google started begging people for their phone numbers upon login, but did not lock users out yet: https://groovypost.com/unplugged/... .

At some point, likely in the late 2010s, Google started locking people out of their accounts until they disclose their phone numbers. This is very unethical. Twitter already did it earlier (around 2016). Many countries' governments outlawed burner phones and people need to disclose their identity to acquire a phone number, as often under the pretext of "fighting terrorism". Surely not for mass-surveillance, am I right? ( https://comparitech.com/blog/... )

Since a few years, Google demands a phone verification for every newly created account. Honestly, that is still better than holding peoples' existing accounts hostage until they disclose a phone number, since locking people out of their accounts a while after creation causes them to lose access to their data.

Of course, people should store any data they do not wish to lose locally. Online services are not personal archives.

I gotta praise Google for notifying users well in advance of purging inactive accounts. In fact, it is amazing they retained abandoned accounts as long as they did, given that they provide 15 GB of cloud and mail storage for free.

Whatever unkind things Google has done, one has to appreciate the positive things.

In comparison, the email service "Web.de" deletes accounts not used for as little as half a year. And they only give 1 GB.

The shadow DOM almost is DRM (digital rights management) in disguise. You can see it but you can't save it.

Don't forget who invented the shadow DOM: Google.

Updates occasionally do more harm than good.

In 2019, people got massively ripped off by a Google Chrome Android update.

They removed two essential features: First, the ability to deactivate pull-to-refresh. When I scrolled up and accidentally refreshed a page, I thought "Didn't I disable this s**t? No big deal, let's go to chrome://flags and… oh wait, where is it? Oh no, they wouldn't remove such an important thing, would they?".

Second, they got rid of the list view for tabs, which showed both page title and URL. Grid view only shows the title, there is only half the space for each title due to two tabs per row (four in horizontal view), and there are fewer items at once on screen.

This significantly damaged my trust in updates. Whenever I update, I expect everything that worked before to still work. The sad reality is that each update brings the risk of something being broken or taken away.

Image source: https://media.askvg.com/articles/... (what they removed)

If you are a web developer, consider using proper page titles.

Page titles are one of the most basic elements of a web page and yet websites often fail to make proper use of them.

Without a proper page title, your user does not have an accurate idea of what page is in the tab without having to open the tab, which gets tedious if many tabs are open. With a proper page title, an instant glance on the tab does suffice.

Some sites only put in their site name or something like "Search - Site Name" without including the search query in the page title, or "User profile - Site Name".

An example of this is, disappointingly, archive.org. As thankful as I am for the Archive, they could make better use of page titles to make browsing their library more convenient. While they use proper page titles on item pages (including both title and author!), they use non-descriptive titles on their 2023 search feature (downgraded from lightweight static HTML+AJAX to a JavaScript app) and user profile pages.

The user name of a profile or a search query and ideally a page number should be in the page title so a browser tab with a search can be found faster and can also be seen on social media sites that auto-generate preview cards with page titles.

Descriptive page titles also improve your search engine ranking! You surely don't want to miss out on that, do you?

I miss the good times when the web was lightweight and efficient.

I miss the times when essential website content was immediately delivered as HTML through the first HTTP request.

I miss the times when I could open a twitter URL and have the tweet text appear on screen in two seconds rather than a useless splash screen followed by some loading spinners.

I miss the times when I could open a YouTube watch page and see the title and description on screen in two seconds rather than in ten.

I miss the times when YouTube comments were readily loaded rather than only starting to load when I scroll down.

JavaScript was lightweight and used for its intended purpose, to enhance the experience by loading content at the page bottom and by allowing interaction such as posting comments without having to reload the entire page, for example.

Now pretty much all popular websites are bloated with heavy JavaScript. Your browser needs to walk through millions of bytes of JavaScript code just to show a tweet worth 200 bytes of text.

The watch page of YouTube (known as "polymer", used since 2017) loads more than eight megabytes of JavaScript last time I checked. In 2012, it was one to two hundred kilobytes of HTML and at most a few hundred kilobytes of JavaScript, mostly for the HTML5 player.

And if one little error dares to occur on a JavaScript-based page, you get a blank page of nothingness.

Sure, computers are more powerful than they used to be. But that does not mean we should deliberately make our new software and website slower and more bloated.

"Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A presentation by Jake Archibald from 2015, but more valid than ever: https://youtube.com/watch/...

YouTube is trying hard to shove their video suggestions into my face.

Video suggestions are on the watch page, inside the video player after playback, and even inside the embedded video player when paused.

Sorry, YouTube, I am not interested in your suggestions before I have even finished watching the current video!

If Google finally made pull-to-refresh optional on Chrome for Android, it would be an admission of failure.

The failure to realize four years earlier that pull-to-refresh is potentially annoying to users, and the failure to listen to the abundant feedback by users who lost submissions or who interrupted playing media due to refreshing accidents.

One can assume that Google has something like a "user experience team". Didn't even one of these "highly qualified" people remotely consider that assigning the same finger movement to scrolling up and to refreshing could be a potential annoyance? Didn't this possibility go through at least one of their IQ 130 brains?

Now guess which is the more frequent purpose of swiping down. Scrolling up or refreshing a page?

Only one of the two is wanted at a time. Either scrolling up or refreshing. Assigning the same finger movement to two things at once is a downright terrible idea.

By making the pull-to-refresh anti-feature impossible to deactivate, Google effectively is begging its users to leave for Opera Mobile or Samsung Internet.

If we are able to use our cars for 20 years, shouldn't smartphones and web browsers be the same way?

Even though it is better to update software, old versions should not be excluded because otherwise a digital dark age comes closer.

Web browsers removed FTP support in 2021 arguing that it is "insecure".

The purpose of FTP is not privacy to begin with but simplicity and compatibility, given that it is widely established. Any FTP user should be aware that sharing files over FTP is not private. For non-private data, that is perfectly acceptable. FTP may be used on the local network to bypass MTP (problems with MTP: https://devrant.com/rants/6198095/... ) for file transfers between a smartphone and a Windows/Linux computer.

A more reasonable approach than eliminating FTP altogether would have been showing a notice to the user that data accessed through FTP is not private. It is not intended for private file sharing in the first place.

A comparable argument was used by YouTube in mid-2021 to memory-hole all unlisted videos of 2016 and earlier except where channel owners intervened. They implied that URLs generated before January 1st, 2017, were generated using an "unsafe" algorithm ( https://blog.youtube/news-and-event... ).

Besides the fact that Google informed its users four years late about a security issue if this reason were true (hint: it almost certainly isn't), unlisted videos were never intended for "protecting privacy" anyway, given that anyone can access them without providing credentials. Any channel owner who does not want their videos to be seen sets them to "private" or deletes them. "Unlisted" was never intended for privacy.

> "In 2017, we rolled out a security update to the system that generates new YouTube Unlisted links"

It is unlikely that they rolled out a security update exactly on new years' day (2017-01-01). This means some early 2017 unlisted videos would still have the "insecure URLs". Or, likelier than not, this story was made up to sound just-so plausible enough so people believe it.

Dear laptop vendors, stop wasting so much precious device estate on nothing!

This wasted physical space could easily fit in six USB ports, or four USB ports and two HDMI ports, or four USB ports and one HDMI and one LAN. Or four USB ports and two SD card slots.

> "Who the heck needs 6 USB ports?"

You don't need more USB ports… until the day you do need them comes.

> "HDMI and LAN are feature creep!"

It's "feature creep", until you need it.

> "Ever heard of USB hubs?"

While better than nothing, they are tedious to carry around and can hardly support more than one external high-power device such as an external hard drive or blu-ray drive, except if you have an external power adapter, which is even more tedious to carry.

Also, have fun closing programs until the operating system stops whining "volume is busy" just so you can unmount your external SSD and then reconnect it through a USB hub. Sounds like fun, huh?

You were playing audio from your external SSD? Too bad. Now you need to close the media player to be able to unmount the SSD, then later restart it and seek the last position. And all of that could be avoided if your laptop happened to have one more USB port.

Hardly anything in tech aged better than H.264.

The H.264 video format, also known as AVC (Advanced Video Coding), was made in the 2000s, is still widely in use in the 2020s, and only slowly being usurped by H.265, which was made in 2013.

Whatever Google has done wrong, I am nonetheless thankful for them releasing the patentless open-source VP9 and AV1 video codecs.

The world needs modern open-source video formats and Google has filled that void.

I know, OGG Theora exists, but that is two decades old and inefficient. VP9 is the counterpart that can compete with H.265.

> "Just keep your battery charge between 25% and 75%, bro! It will slow the wearing of your non-replaceable battery!"

So you want me to artificially halve my useable battery capacity just so its actual capacity reduces slower?

That's the insanity with non-replaceable batteries.

A user-replaceable battery is almost like a battery that never dies. No effort wasted with tedious "battery care". No worries about weardown from high usage. Just enjoying using the device.

It's 2023 and smartphones can't even properly upload files in background.

When an upload is running in background while I watch YouTube or use other apps, the upload just stops at some point. The speed indicator in the top bar goes down to a few KB/s and I know immediately the upload has stopped well before it could have finished.

When re-opening the tab, I see a blank page and a loading bar. This means the tab has unloaded. Now I will have to re-select all those files again, which comes with its own troubles ( https://devrant.com/rants/9879401/... ).

Mobile browsers need to have a "protect this tab from unloading" option. Samsung already introduced a "keep open" option in the task switcher to protect individual apps from unloading in background. Why not do this on tab level?

Once the user locks their screen, this alone might interrupt the uploading process. On laptops and desktop computers, the upload keeps running in background.

Come on, this should be as easy as childs' play for billion-dollar corporations. Aren't smartphones "smart" enough to detect that a page is currently uploading files so its tab is not unloaded?

If smartphones can not accomplish this simple task that desktop computers and laptops can easily handle since the 2000s, it is a sad and embarrassing state.

> "A flat design UI reduces cognitive load!"

Oh really, Google? If that is your aim, then how come you increase cognitive load by making pull-to-refresh mandatory on your mobile web browser, which constantly has to be avoided by the user?

> "Just use power saving mode, bro! It will extend the life of your non-replaceable battery!"

Of course I bought a smartphone with powerful processors just to limit their performance for the sake of delaying the expiry of its non-replaceable battery.

> "You don't need to film in 4K if you don't have a 4K screen!"

Besides the obvious fact that one might own a 4K screen in future, 4K (2160p) looks better than Full HD (1080p) on a 1600×900 "HD+" screen! It looks pure and clear thanks to higher bitrate and chroma subsampling.

What? You didn't know almost all consumer video cameras, including smartphones, record with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, meaning 1080p video only has 540p of colour information? It has 1080p of luminance, but not 1080p of colour.

120fps and 240fps filming isn't just for slow motion playback, but recent smartphones have 120 Hz screens so those videos can finally be watched as ultra-smooth motion with audio.

If only all smartphones encoded high-framerate videos in real-time with the same framerate recorded from the image sensor instead of stupidly slowing down when encoding.

Granted, this is a thing Apple has always done right: they encoded their "slow motion" videos in real-time and let the user select the slowed-down portions during playback!

Let the user set their preferred playback speed in the video editor, don't dictate that 1× playback speed is 1/4 of real-life speed. 1× playback speed must be 1× real-life speed to clear up all confusion.

Besides, laptops with 120 Hz screens existed as early as 2011 (Samsung 700G7A)!.

I am sick of misrotated videos.

Sometimes, the phone camera software saves a video vertically because the user hits "record" before the software has detected that the user is holding the smartphone horizontally, because the software stupidly launches in vertical orientation by default.

So the software wants the user to wait until it has finally detected horizontal orientation, which causes the user to miss out on a moment.

How about the camera software actually saves the video in the orientation it was recorded in for the most time, rather than only the beginning of the video?

If I can think of this idea, billion-dollar companies surely can.

In the meantime, misrotated videos can be fixed using this ffmpeg command on Linux or Windows:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -metadata:s:v rotate="0" -c copy output_file.mp4

And if the phone was held with the home button to the left side:

ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -metadata:s:v rotate="180" -c copy output_file.mp4

This solution is superior compared to using -vf (video filters) because it only touches the metadata of the video. No re-encoding. This means no quality loss and no CPU/GPU power needed to process the video again. It just passes through.

Is Google trying to win a "who can create the shittiest file picker" award?

The file picker of Android OS can not even remember the last selected sorting options, and its default sorting is alphabetical. Does anyone really use alphabetical sorting? Sorting by the last modified time or by size is far more useful than alphabetical sorting can ever hope being.

The only use for alphabetical sorting is sorting files with incorrect time stamp attribute but a correct time stamp or number in the file name.

The file picker of Android OS also features pull-to-refresh. As already said, pull-to-refresh is not a helpful shortcut but a useless anti-feature. ( https://devrant.com/rants/9831669/... ) Why would anyone need to refresh in a file picker? How likely is a file to not exist before opening the file picker and then appear while browsing for the file? All pull-to-refresh does here is draining the phone battery by reloading the thumbnails.

The file search feature of the Google file picker can only search the entire storage. A search can not be limited to the currently viewed directory. Even the file picker of Windows Vista from 2007 could search only the viewed directory.

Obviously, it lacks any kind of range selection. No A-to-B selection that is like shift-click selection on desktop, and not even the inferior drag-to-select that Samsung has implemented, which would still be better than annoying individual selection.

Microsoft could build a better file picker at a time some of us were in primary school than Google can build today. Come on, Google, just scrap your garbage software and go copycat Microsoft. Useful plagiarized software is better than useless self-made garbage.

At least the Google file picker does one thing right: It remembers the last directory the user picked a file from and opens it next time.

Smartphone users in 2012: "Non-replaceable batteries need to be outlawed."

Politicians in 2027: "Were… were starting to think about it. Have some patience."

Politics in a nutshell.

It's 2023 and smartphone vendors' pre-installed file managers are slooooooowly beginning to catch up with the functionality that the third-party ES File Explorer already had in 2012.

Samsung's latest file manager "My Files" finally has a draggable scroll bar, background file transfer (one can browse files while a transfer is running), drag-to-select (which is still not nearly as fast as the instant A-to-B range selection of ES File Explorer which simulates shift+click selection on desktop), and even staying in the current directory after tapping on "Copy" or "Move" rather than going to the starting directory!

And finally, when copying or moving files to a MicroSD card or a USB-OTG device, files' date and time attributes are not discarded and reset to now, but the original date and time of the files are retained! ES File Explorer could do that with root access.

Dear Samsung, couldn't you have thought of these simple things a decade ago and saved your users lots of headaches?

Imagine a billion-dollar company fails to think of putting a simple "jump to page number" feature in their PDF reader.

Google Drive PDF reader for Android.

Pull-to-refresh is useless.

If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.

I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.

Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.

It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.

Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.

To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.

Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.

To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.

A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.

Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.

If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.

If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:

html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }

Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.

Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.

If modern computers have more memory but websites demand more memory, doesn't that defeat the benefit?

For example, let's assume YouTube's HTML-based user interface from 2014 needed 100 MB of RAM per tab. Now, computers might have 4 times the RAM on average, but YouTube's polymer JS-based user interface (UI) might need 400 MB per tab, a proportional increase. In fact, the browser needs to walk through a heavy 10 MB pile of JavaScript before being able to show anything on modern YouTube.

It seems like the higher demands nullify the performance benefit from the increased specifications of modern hardware. Computers get stronger but demands and workloads rise too, so performance isn't improved because some website operators feel the need to show off their "fancy" JavaScript.

An underestimated security threat are developers who betray their users by making software less useful with updates, discouraging users from installing updates again.

https://chromestory.com/2019/07/...

It is increasingly difficult to believe that Google CAPTCHAs are not deliberately made unsolvable.

Everyone hates CAPTCHA, that is nothing new. As most people know, CAPTCHA frequently whines "please try again" after the user provides the correct answer. Sometimes it shows "Please select all matching images." when no new images with the named subject exist. However, now Google is taking it to a new level.

After clicking, the pictures take five seconds to fade to white and the new pictures take another five seconds to fade in. And CAPTCHA challenges have an expiry duration of two minutes. This causes CAPTCHAs to expire before it is possible to solve them.

Does Google think I am not a human because I don't have the time to waste whack-a-moling random StreetView pictures?

I have a feeling that Google is laughing at us for wasting efforts solving CAPTCHAs that are not meant to be solved.