Comment by ryandrake
1 day ago
Computing history is rife with examples of APIs that would never have existed, had the API designer stepped back for a few seconds and asked himself "Why am I letting developers do this?" Someone deliberately added the ability to move the browser window around and pop up other browser windows, yet somehow never imagined this use case???
Thinking of all the possible ways some assholes could abuse a new functionality is an acquired skill, and one I believe eventually makes you stop coming up with any ideas.
After all, entrepreneurs can and will abuse anything and everything in this world.
It doesn't keep you from coming up with ideas, it just keeps you coming up with ideas to mitigate the harms. The obvious one that's usually neglected is giving users the power to disable/limit/control behaviors that are likely to be abused.
We wouldn't need to bother with installing addons to limit javascript and block ads if those were just part of the browser to start with. Every new feature added should have options that put users in control of if, when, and how it gets used. Right now, even the browsers that give users the most control usually don't go farther than an enable/disable flag in about:config
This is exactly right. The end user should be in the driver's seat, not the web developer. Often when I use computers today, I feel like a passenger, going wherever the developer is choosing to take me. So much browser development and innovation lately serves to empower the developer and enable them to do things to your computer, but with very little empowerment reserved for the user.
Computing history is rife with examples of API designers who get attacked for building walled gardens and denying user power when they ask such questions. There was a time, for example, when "data portability" was widely understood to mean that Facebook should let Google programmatically extract your data and forward it to fourth parties (https://techcrunch.com/2008/05/15/he-said-she-said-in-google...).
Today we know that there's no genuine question of user control here, because virtually every user has a mental model that a "webpage" is something different and much more scope-limited than a "program". I don't expect that steampowered.com should be able to launch the game I just bought, even though that capability is easily available from a similar-looking interface by the same developers I have installed on my computer. In 1995 it wasn't so obvious that people in 2025 would think this way.
Social dynamics in the digital world are completely different from anything known to man before the internet. Imagine someone from 2090 coming over and saying "aren't you afraid that your friend will literally take a knife and stab you in the back during your birthday party". Technically he's not wrong, but come on, it doesn't happen really. And then you learn that in 2080's something similar was a major societal problem.