Remember when we all hated how some web sites had audio that would begin playing unsolicited? Although that thankfully went away years ago for the most part, we have newer versions of annoying coding. I usually notice them on my iPad (Safari browser), but sometimes on my desktop too (Chrome and Firefox with ad blocking).
Most mornings I browse several aggregator sites that list interesting articles. My normal practice is to press and hold on a link and choose “Open in New Tab”. In this way I open a series of tabs I’d like to read later while remaining on the site I’m currently browsing. Here’s what got me riled up today:
Some sites have disabled “Open in New Tab”. Sometimes nothing happens, which is annoying enough, but worse is when the site goes ahead and opens the selection in that same tab. You lose your place and have to open a new tab and go back again. On some sites, obviously run by the genetically disadvantaged, this even occurs if you try to save a link to the “Reading List” function.
Pressing the top of the Safari browser page scrolls quickly to the top. But oh no, let’s just disable that and make the user manually scroll up. What possible reason could there be for this? I’m looking at YOU GoogleNews, you douche canoes.
The iPad’s pinch-to-zoom function is nicely intuitive. So if I have a web site with lots of text, OBVIOUSLY my first thought is to disable it! Users can use the “reader” function in Safari, but I don’t see why this should be forced upon us. I maintain two web sites of my own. While my coding skills are primitive, pinch-to-zoom works on both of them, so these assholes are clearly disabling it on purpose.
Thank you, you fucking goat felchers, but I don’t need a warning that I’ve clicked a link that leaves your site. I most definitely don’t need that warning to actually prevent me from doing so (I’m guessing this is due to an interaction with an ad blocking extension, but still…).
And finally, the demon spawn of our age…
Enough with the fucking ads that block out the page I’m viewing!!! It’s bad enough when it’s a banner at the bottom that I can click away, but lately it’s an abomination that completely obliterates the site I’m trying to view. If I’ve zoomed out after arriving on the site and then the ad plows through, it sometimes even prevents resizing and clicking it away! How can you possibly think this will give me a good impression of your site and make me want to visit again?! Lots of web sites out there - I’ll go elsewhere and change my bookmarks. Cut it out!!!
This is done with the viewport meta tag. They set both the minimum-scale and maximum-scale to ‘1’. It tells the mobile browser it shouldn’t zoom at all. The only excuse I can think of a designer having for demanding this is that it makes a webpage feel more like an app. Users who want that kind of experience can just download the damn app that’s pushed every time the page is visited, though.
I hate mobile sites that seem to be designed with the assumption that the users are drunk and don’t have the fine-motor skills needed to click on a link. The mobile Slashdot site, for example, has made the entire article summary text into a link (via javascript). So if I’m scrolling around and briefly (drunkenly) tap the text while doing so, I’m going to that article. At least they let me zoom in on it, though.
Whenever I am annoyed by modern website functionality, I just smile because I never have to deal with fucking Comet Cursor or whatever it was called again.
There are other uses for the right click than to steal your useless images. And if I really did want to violate copyright law, I could take a screenshot, view source, change my browser settings, etc.
I think some sites disable pinch-zoom because they need to keep their ads visible. I have taken to using the Mercury browser because it lets me set a default text magnification and lets me zoom with multi-finger taps (Atomic does this as well). Lamentably, Mercury does not work correctly with external links on this forum, I have to hold to get a menu.
I’d like to see web browsers stop letting these things work at all until I explicitly give permission.
A website should not be able to disable my right click context menu
A website should not be able to resize my window
A website should not be able to make noise
…unless I ok it or whitelist it.
I still think it’s absurd that in this day, OSes don’t have the option to limit sound to certain apps, and web browsers don’t limit sound to certain domains/tabs.
Don’t you remember the MIDI craze of the late 90s? Where every page out there that wasn’t done by an actual company had auto-play MIDI music? Like, it was the new thing and so AWESOME. I mean, how could someone not want to hear a MIDI rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” when they view a site? Kinda makes me want to make a website with that again just to either make people nostalgic or piss them off.
When I saw the thread title, “Web sites that disable normal browser functions,” my brain converted that to “Websites that disembowel normal functions.”
The first two are already available options in a vanilla copy of Firefox. The third one it offers is the inability to raise or lower windows. It’s under Firefox (or Tools) > Options > Content > Enable JavaScript > Advanced. I have all three options disabled, although some sites seem to be able to work around the no-right-click option. (I block JavaScript altogether on such sites.)
I do agree that sound would be a great addition to these options, but I think it would work better as a whitelist. I find that the Firefox addon Flashblock, since, it can also optionally handle HTML5 video and audio, works really well for this. Firefox has a built in plugin block, but it doesn’t work with HTML5, last I checked.
I’ve never seen a site that could block the ability to open in a new tab completely, just the right-click (on mobile press-and-hold) menu. I would think this is a flaw in the mobile Safari. I mean, unless the site is somehow detecting the press-and-hold event and creating a fake “Open in New Tab” option, I don’t see how this is being done.
Here’s one for you that not only does the midi thing but also has those FUN sparklies that chase your cursor around - remember those? website with automatic midi
Yes! I hate all of these! Most can be mitigated, but its annoying to have to futz around with tweaks and plugins, and its trickier on mobile devices.
There’s some coding that makes certain images on apple devices only give you the copy option on pictures and not the save to photos option. This means you have to copy it to some other program first and then save it from there rather than directly.
The pinch to zoom disable is particularly annoying when there is a form, because then it automatically zooms in, but too much, and you can’t zoom out to see what field you are entering or access the send button.
And I hate limited use mobile sites. I can’t think of a time where I didn’t have to switch to desktop version to access what I needed. Which is a shame because sometimes the mobile version is better designed, without all the flashy film flam, and would actually be superior if they let it have access to all the content.
It used to be very popular on MySpace pages. I’m seeing a trend towards to same thing on some Tumblr pages. You can change it in preferences, but YouTube auto starts videos. If you reopen last session and have more than one YouTube page open in multiple tabs, they will all just start playing simultaneously in your browser.
You got me all excited and just linked me back to this thread. That’s just cruel.
Well I know in Windows 7 you can turn off the sounds on specific programs that are open up. Which I find helpful for games that leave the ambient sounds going even when you’ve alt-tabbed out of them.
Yeah, I especially love that one when it’s some fan site for a band or something and they prevent you from stealing images of album covers. Just because you scanned it doesn’t make it “your” image.
For the latter they do; my sound card is very basic, yet with KDE clicking on the sound signal there is a slider for the card, a separate slider for Sound Events [ presumably system sounds like beep ], and a new slider for every instance of sound I play simultaneously, such as if I ran 3 videos and 6 songs ( which I could do using merely the one player or a variety ) and 1 game, I would end up with 12 adjustable sliders.
As for the other things I have flash disabled and javascript disabled, but can toggle either with buttons on the menu bar provided by extensions. The javascript toggle is a little red ‘JS’.
That’s just cruel.