Users who can program the computer to automate tasks can escape online advertising and tracking in ways that others cannot. Truly, the only significant difference between the two is that it is far more difficult to manipulate, analyse and serve ads to "bots" and charge advertisers money for it. Automation is taken as a signal "it's a bot". The mouse is taken as a signal "we have a human on the line". Of course, the "tech" company model of the world needs users to not be programmers. Generally no one (seriously) programs a computer exclusively with a mouse. I will give you $50 million for your efforts. Try doing everything your computer does by hand. (Obviously for some tasks, e.g., ones involving graphics, we need a mouse.) Doing that with the mouse is beyond awkward it's counterintuitive. I can automate repeated tasks with the keyboard. (The office being the exception but I still use it minimally.) Then muscle memory totally breaks you need to learn two sets of keybindings for the same context, and that introduces a hesitation for every keypress, which kills speed and enjoyment. about: or view-source:) where it doesn't work at all, or doesn't work consistently so one must disable it. 99% of the time it works perfectly, but then there are the handful of sites or browser specific pages (eg. I've tried tridacyl and other vim-style plugins for browsers several times in the past, but always end up uninstalling them in disappointment, because it's not possible to have a consistent experience. I can't build muscle memory or be confident using a feature if it only works 90% of the time. I've found that a feature or shortcut is only useful if it's consistent. Your comment on '"Ctrl+F" instead as I'm too scared to try "/" now' really resonated with me, because I've thought about this before. My point was going to be that consistency is key. the 'modern' web is pain.Īnyway, this wasn't going to be a rant. It's not just overridng default shortcuts, but custom context/rightclick menus, custom 'links' (where clicking them runs javascript code to window.open, instead of being a real link), custom form fields that advertise 'excellent accessibility', where the fields would have been accessible anyway if they didn't decide to reimplement them, disabling text selection, overriding focus styles because the accessible styles 'look ugly'. So many sites seem to feel the need to reimplement things that are already part of most browsers or even in the spec. Unfortunately this is broken on the "modern" web as many web pages "helpfully" override the "/" keyĪrgh this kind of thing makes me really cross.
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