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Comment by dollop43 | Hacker News Reader

I seldom use this feature, but when I do and I can't find the encoding menu, then it will be a very frustrating experience. Their logic seems to be like dialing emergency service is a rarely use feature based on telemetry, so we will just remove that. No discussion is allowed, if you challenged, then they ask you about do you have data about the use case of dialing emergency service? People can still send text to emergency service, it is fine.

And because of this post, I just checked if chromium supported encoding menu. Yep, they removed it long ago. Basically, when you need to read some very old Japanese site where their encoding is pretty non standard, you are screwed.

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Per https://hsivonen.fi/encoding-telemetry/, it looks like they run a special encoding detector on .jp sites, which is presumably designed specifically to choose between the various Japanese encodings (Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, etc).

I think your example of emergency services is a bit hyperbolic. This is a feature that is really not often used, whose omission is not fatal, which often requires several tries to get right, and which is increasingly less useful thanks to gradual changes on the Web. Much more widely-used features like FTP and Flash have been deprecated; people howl and yell every time, but yet things still seem to work.

So now you have to rely on hardcoded heuristics based on the website’s domain name instead of just being able to choose. There are so many complicated heuristics to choose this hard-to-predict factor which it still gets wrong often. Removing the user’s control over this seems like a dreadful move.

> This is a feature that is really not often used, whose omission is not fatal, which often requires several tries to get right, and which is increasingly less useful thanks to gradual changes on the Web.

How often do you visit small indie websites in non-English languages? Because in my experience, as soon as you do, this is not a rare occurrence.

Of course, it is not about the fatality. It is an example to point out that a rarely used feature does not mean it is not important.

Another example is Google search remove the ability to perform exact text search such as "some phrase I found important to search". Maybe based on statistic, it was 20% of user using that, 80% of users does not rely on this feature. The logic is saying messing up 20% of user is not a problem. We are serving the 80% of users pretty great.

The current paradigm of UX design for providing "good default" to serve 80% of users and removing customization to screw 20% of advanced user makes me pretty helpless for using modern app. That's why I prefer cli nowadays for the flexibility of those software.

It breaks things without possibility of repair for a certain group of users. How is this not an issue?

> Basically, when you need to read some very old Japanese site where their encoding is pretty non standard, you are screwed.

As it happens, the primary reason why the single menu item remains instead of an override being totally gone is usage in Japan. (Many people in this thread comment as if Firefox had done what Chrome did: complete removal of override as you note.) The remaining menu item is pretty accurate for its primary use case, which is dealing with Japanese legacy sites that misdeclare their encoding. (There is one exception: If the page declares UTF-8 but is actually ISO-2022-JP, then you don't have recourse.)

> when you need to read some very old Japanese site where their encoding is pretty non standard, you are screwed

If you need to read them frequently, yes. Otherwise, if this is just one-off, maybe user can download the page source, extract text content, paste into text editor and select encoding? Do you have an example CJK site I may try?

I rarely need to do that, so I cannot find an example for the moment. It is usually a one-off thing, then yes I could do the conversion manually, but it was obviously an usability degraded.

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