Will devRant exist in the year 2100?

If I could create laws, I would pass a "software usability act" which would eliminate many annoyances we face daily.

For example, the law would mandate range selection in file managers, mandate time-stamped file names in camera and voice recording apps, and require that browsers open a new tab next to the currently open tab instead of at the end, and all user interfaces must have a dark mode to reduce eye strain, and all operating systems must have a blue light filter, text editors must create a temporary copy when saving to avoid corrupting the existing file, camera applications should not corrupt the entire video file when ending unexpectedly (crashing), cancelling file operations must not cause data loss ( https://support.google.com/photos/... ), no mandatory pull-to-refresh ( https://chromestory.com/2019/07/... ), to mention a few examples.

Mobile file managers commonly lack a range selection feature (also known as shift selection or A-to-B selection), where all items between two selected items of a list can be selected immediately. ES File Explorer had this in 2012, yet many fancy new file managers still don't have this. To select many items, each item needs to be tapped individually. This is an unacceptable annoyance.

This is not to be confused with the inferior drag-to-select which requires holding the finger on the screen until all desired items are selected. Drag-to-select is not range selection, only its ugly stepsister.

Ah yes, under the imaginary software usability act, Mozilla would have to say good-bye to its evil add-on signing. "For our protection" my arse.

I never understood the purpose of posthumous copyright terms.

Dead people don't benefit from copyright, making it pointless for them.

Competition is necessary for a healthy marketplace.

Whenever there is a monopoly or a near-monopoly, its owners can treat their users poorly through restrictions (Android OS becoming like iOS), planned obsolescence, unfounded content takedowns (YouTube), account lock-outs until the user provides more personal data (Google demanding phone numbers), subscription services instead of ownership (Adobe, BMW heated seats), and users would have nowhere else to go.

Us users would never accept data lock-in for photos and videos from the camera app on smartphones.

Yet, for some reason, we accepted data lock-in for saved pages on mobile web browsers.

I believe that without competition, YouTube would likely ban re-uploads entirely.
YouTube thankfully tolerates re-uploads of deleted videos because it knows that the minute they prohibit re-uploads, competitors like Dailymotion and BitchUte would get immediate massive growth.

There are entire channels dedicated to re-uploading deleted videos of specific channels! (for example: https://youtube.com/channel/... )

In 2017, YouTube alternatives were rather immature, but they have developed: https://youtube.com/watch/...

Google's "alliance for open media" which created nice video codecs appears to be far more "open" than the "open handset alliance" that has locked down Android OS file management and task management severely.

1080p is the new 720p. 720p is the new 480p.

Don't attack flies using tanks.

In 2020, a bug was found in gnome-terminal where selecting many megabytes of text inside the terminal would cause the terminal emulator to crash.

As a remedy, the brain of gnome-terminal developer Christian Persch spawned a "brilliant idea": Limiting the "Select all" feature to selecting only the portion of text that is visible on screen.

In other words, Persch made the "Select all" option useless. After pressing "Select all", it appeared as if everything was selected, but once you scrolled up, nothing beyond what was visible was selected.

By solving a minor problem that rarely ever occurs, Christian Persch created a major problem that often occurs.

Source for screenshot: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/...

What I like about devRant is the lack of usernames in the feed so people vote without judgement to the author. What was written matters more than who wrote it.

Obviously, I appreciate that it uses lightweight JavaScript. No JS bombs like mainstream social media. ( https://devrant.com/rants/9987051/... )

Also, posts have no titles and no formatting, just raw content. No clickbaiting and no bold italic screaming are possible. Posts have to get just straight to the point.

I download YouTube videos just to watch them on a clean user interface without distracting advertisements and suggested videos.

As a lawmaker, I would grant the right to root.

Smartphone and computer manufacturers must not take measures to block users from rooting their devices.

Like pull-to-refresh, auto-selecting the file name in "save as" dialogues is a design trend we are perpetuating without questioning its usefulness.

The "rename" feature of file managers and the file name fields in "Save as" dialogues and screenshot tools automatically select file names without the ending, expecting the user to want to replace it.

It would more sense to place the cursor between the file name and the ending ".png".

I can't remember the last time I replaced a file name. I almost always rename files to add a comment or time stamp at the end.

Adding a comment after the time stamp, for example, "Screenshot at 2024-02-04 12-04-37 progress bar.png", makes more sense than replacing the file name. A file name with a time stamp is more easily searched.

Samsung introduced a useful feature to their smartphones just to cripple it one year later.

In 2015, Samsung introduced camera quick launch to their Galaxy S6, where the camera could be accessed by double-pressing the home button. Before that, the double press accessed the far less useful S Voice.

A year later, with their Android 6.0 update and the phones that had Android 6.0 pre-installed (starting with the Galaxy S7), they ruined it with a useless "Camera has been opened via quick launch" pop-up that would appear if the camera app detects that the phone is in the pocket. This was detected using the front and rear proximity sensors.

If this useless pop-up was closed with the "back" key or by tapping the background behind the pop-up or by doing nothing for five seconds, the camera application would close itself. It would only stay open if the user tapped the tiny little "OK" button that could easily be missed in a crucial moment.

This made it impossible to blindly launch the camera while the phone is still inside the pocket, defeating one of the greatest benefits of the feature. And closing that pop-up takes time that could lead to a moment being missed by the camera.

Additionally, Samsung introduced a bug in Android 6.0 where launching the camera within seconds of going into stand-by mode would cause it to exit automatically after a few seconds.

Screenshot credits: https://forums.androidcentral.com/t...

Your three-second password retry delay is far more likely to annoy users than preventing a brute-force attack.

If you insist on a retry delay, let the user enter a password five times without any delay. This would make no difference in the grand scheme, the trillions of retries needed for a brute-force attack, and guessing a password takes longer than three seconds of thinking anyway.

Another alternative is a tenth of the password retry delay but one added character. One added character slows down a brute-force attack by at least sixty-two (62) times, so one more character but a tenth of the password retry delay would still mean more than six (6) times the protection against brute-forcing.

On Linux, the password retry delay can thankfully be reduced by changing a value inside /etc/pam.d/common-auth or /etc/pam.d/login (out of scope for this post, you can search online for more details).

“ Your smartphone doesn't need a large battery! Just use your power bank! ”

Oh really? Then your smartphone doesn't need a good camera. Just use your DSLM camera!

Totally the best possible excuse for fewer USB ports on a laptop: "It's more streamlined!"

Yeah, when I am on the go and need that one additional port, my first thought will be "well, thankfully it at least is streamlined! That's helpful!"

Mozilla and Wikimedia thankfully encourage Internet users into choosing the open and patentless VP9 format by denying H.265 support until H.265 is patent-free.

Well-done, Mozilla and WMF! I don't think H.265 is a bad format, but so long it is encumbered by patents, it is in the public interest that it does not become the dominant format.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US...

> "Mozilla will not support HEVC while it is encumbered by patents."

Not only does every app need to have an export option, but new exports must create new, time-stamped files rather than overwriting an existing export!

A counter-example is "Battery Monitor Widget" by CCC71 or 3C71. That app creates a file in the main user directory, named "bmw_history.txt" (no relation to the car manufacturer).

When a new export is created, the existing bmw_history.txt is overwritten. This could lead to data loss if the user is unaware of this behaviour.

The developer thought of creating an export ability, but messed up at the file naming process.

Mandatory time-stamped user data exports for every app would not be so bad. This makes sure no developer would forget about it. GDPR gave us data portability for social media platforms. Let's do it for apps too. (Sorry, Samsung Internet, you can no longer lock in saved pages. Your users are sick of it.)

> Sorry, you have not updated your browser this week. Please update your browser to use our site.

*user tries to update browser*

> Sorry, your operating system is no longer supported. Please upgrade your operating system to install this update.

*user tries to update operating system*

> Sorry, your device is no longer supported. Please buy a new phone to use this operating system.

*buys new phone*

> Pay! Pay! Pay! Consoooom!

————

See where this is going? It is thinly-veiled planned obsolescence.

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.