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Comment by valyagolev | Hacker News Reader

Apart from using hacking to overcome imposed limitations such as these, I am amazed by the number of times I had to use my chops to overcome what was simply a bug. Opening the web inspector is such a normal moment of dealing with other people's websites, I have no clue how people manage without it.

I was very... surprised when I managed to productively use "javascript:(some code)" in the URL bar of the browser of my phone once when I was stuck in the airport probably like 10 years ago and needed to do something that just wasn't working normally. Now that we're used to smart phones it probably sounds quite basic but it was absolutely weird back then.

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About a year ago I was attempting to book a room through the Hilton payment system but my card kept getting declined.

Opening up the web inspector revealed that the JS was stripping any leading 0's for the CVV. I ended up manually crafting a curl request to hit the GraphQL endpoint and was able to successfully book the room.

I did reach out to a Platform Architect on LinkedIn describing the bug, but never heard back about it. Was a total shot in the dark, though, so no surprise there.

>>Opening the web inspector is such a normal moment of dealing with other people's websites, I have no clue how people manage without it.

As a C++ programmer who has absolutely no idea how to even open the dev console in browser - I just close the website. If I can't scroll it, if it has stupid popups that I can't dismiss, if it lets me get halfway through checkout and then misteriously empties my basket? I'll maybe give it one more try and then just close the website.

F12

Or right clicking on, and "Inspect" on the specific element that you're trying to work with.

Ctrl+W

On the phone?

The web is broken. Someone's website wouldn't scroll (I don't remember the details, and I don't think I wanted to find out --- maybe it was overflow: hidden, but it could've been something else), and the only way I could figure out to deal with it was to open up the devtools responsive design mode and pretend the screen was bigger than it was so that the full page could show, and then use the browser's scrollbar from within that view.

I’m one of the few weirdos who actually seeks out and reads the ToS & privacy policy posted on sites I visit and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into a site with infinite scrolling and a footer (with all the “important” legal stuff) that a user will never see but for a fleeting moment. A feature or a bug? I’m never quite sure.

In the footer, there's also sometimes the language picker, the "desktop version" link (often acting as a button with same urls, so you can't just save it), and the dev docs links. There's a site where I have to specifically open a page that is not infinite to make sure I enabled the desktop mode before going back to whatever I actually came to do

The web is broken.

When an app on your computer or phone doesn't work well do you say Windows or iOS is broken, or do you say the app is broken?

A broken website doesn't mean the web is broken.

> When an app on your computer or phone doesn't work well do you say Windows or iOS is broken

Yes. All the time. A good platform supports that which builds upon it.

The grain of the web is so that it's much easier to write something broken than something that works.

That's true of all development, granted, but doubly so the web, so yep... the web is broken.

Most websites work quite well.

That was mostly true before client side rendering.

I remember the DSI bookmarklet community that utilized "javascript:". That was so long ago and I was so young, I don't even remember how I found out about them.

>Opening the web inspector is such a normal moment of dealing with other people's websites, I have no clue how people manage without it.

I ocassionally use it to debug faulty script submission or stuck websites or some paywall banner (as a consumer), but one great way to manage without it, is to avoid those websites in the first place.

If I see an incompetent business website, I take my business elsewhere...

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