Hacker News Reader

Comment by mystraline | Hacker News Reader

Ive asked this before with no answer:

A browser (say, Firefox) is a "User Agent". Agents are supposed to act on our behalf, and in our best interests when ambiguities are present.

So, why are OUR user agents acting on behalf of website operators and their admins and users, and not on our behalf?

Having CSS that prevents usability shouldn't be implemented. Or it should be an easy toggle to turn on/off, without having to resort to Ublock Origin filters.

Same with 'prevention of right-click'. Why is this even implemented?

Or JavaScript also has a lot of onerous calls that are anti-user. I can understand why some of them are needed, but again, should be trivial to toggle.

So, why aren't our agents acting like proper agents?

View on HN

I know this is a bad answer, but. Web is a multi-stakeholder environment. Publishers and shitty content farms are stakeholders too. So they find a use for selection toggling in their dirty business and push for it.

But in case of text selection toggling, it has likely appeared because of the need to make interactive elements non-inadvertently-selectable. Because complex UIs.

All of those things have some niche use in an element here and there that allows for much better interaction in some kind of site.

I'm honestly at a loss with unselectable text, but for example capturing the right mouse button is very useful for applications.

Anyway, yes, it should be easy to turn those things off site-wide, like it's easy to zoom.

The one that comes to mind immediately is when you create a draggable element with text it's usually desirable for the user that click-drag moves the element rather than selects the text depending which part you click.

Removing the attribute would probably make things worse, as site operators then overlay transparent elements - making everything even worse than when it was just styled as such.

Huh, draggability is a good argument, actually.

Because browsers and their operators, like any other industry, over time morph to a shareholder driven mess that needs to constantly be integrating with feature/product X.

If the same operator also controls the entire adspace in the web, and has significant impact/input on other connected media devices beyond webbrowsers, what incentive do they have to empower users to "ignore" content, be it ads, ai slop, bad UI? Ther's literally none, the number still goes up revenue wise.

Unavoidable content delivery attached to revenue generation is the present and the future and the only solution is disonnected services/products that aren't tied to dollars.

Still, it’s sad we’re in this timeline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com