this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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99% of sites only need to know your screen aspect ratio and maybe available input devices, can't think of a good reason to share anything else
Knowing OS is useful for download links.
I’d be down for an ask to allow that info. Sort of like how sites request access to cam and mic.
Before Windows 10, NVidia and others had this button Detect what thing suits me best on their websites. Now many of them just look it up in one's fingerprint without asking.
Oh no, they'd have to list more than one link,the horror!
The vast majority of people would have no clue what to download.
Let them be confused. They'll learn eventually. Or they won't. Computers are too user friendly today anyway.
Fuckin oath. If we cater to the stupid too much the folks who are middling just get lazy. Make people think. It’s important that we know how to use our brains.
It's like undefined behavior - most people usually do one thing, but it's perfectly acceptable for me to make my website as hard-to-use as I want. Ctrl-click the website logo to submit the form.
Microsoft hides their links if they see you run linux. So you need to manually set your OS in the browser settings to see the download link. Very convenient.
having 3 different ones solves that issue though? the user can figure out whic OS they're running pretty well imo.
I can tell you've never had to do T1 tech support before.
It's kind of staggering just how illiterate users can be.
I doubt the fix is to make them need less literacy
When you are competing for customers not providing the illiterate morons of the world a simple UI leads to them going to your competitor which does.
And unfortunately those illiterate morons outnumber every one else by a significant chunk.
That's a fair perspective, but most people strive for as few clicks between users and their targets as possible. Forcing a user to become semi-tech-competent by sending them on a fetch quest to figure out their os, while not an inherently bad thing, does work against this overall goal....
Idk, it's like education vs service industry goal setting, that's all I'm trying to get at here lol
Edit: plus, there's no guarantee that it will remain just the big 3 for forever. There was a time before Linux, maybe we'll see a time after windows.... Unlikely, but one can dream lol
Since we have CSS what would be the purpose of the server knowing the aspect ratio?
Ideally, to save bandwidth on both sides, the server would only want to serve you the JS and CSS you need. I'm not sure how frequently that optimization is made, however.
I’m a bit rusty on this, but I think you’d need to split your Sass/SCSS/etc before Webpack will perform tree-shaking or allow lazy-loading. I don’t think many devs wrote it that way: personally, I like my mobile rules beside my desktop ones, since my styling is component-wise.
I haven't done UI work in years so I'm not sure how they do it these days.
Fair point, there could be reasons, and I'd say there's no privacy concerns if that's all they get, but I know it's part of fingerprinting. I said 99% so they don't even need to know that
that's how css gets its media queries, user agents
as a front end web developer, I've found it useful to know what user agent is requesting a page in order to load conditional styling. For example, to compensate for Safari's god-awful outlines support (pre-version 16).