>I wonder what's different about our searches and expectations.
The difference might be that they (including myself) don't ask search engines for facts like "doors of stone release date". They'll search for "doors of stone", find personally reliable sources like Wikipedia, Fandom, Goodreads, browse them and decide on an answer. When sources fail to appear, they'll either refine the search (like "doors of stone rothfuss") or call it a failure and maybe try a different search engine.
This is one the reasons why Brave has been good for me so far. When a relevant Wikipedia article exists, it shows it, even if the title doesn't match. Whereas lately DDG and others don't. In fact, you can see this with "doors of stone". Brave shows "The Kingkiller Chronicle", DDG doesn't at all, Google has it low down in the results.
It also shows Reddit discussions without needing to explicitly filter for it. And I use ad block to remove the AI summariser that takes up half the screen, it's not what I want from a search engine.
Yea I do enjoy that new(ish) discussions section feature. Anecdotally have found those to return more relevant results than the old site:reddit.com in google
The brave results are usually relevant for me, but I find it struggles when I'm looking for something very specific. Their indexing of reddit seems to have a lot of gaps when compared with Google.
Same here. Much like Firefox, I think it's important to use a search index that isn't tied to the larger players (Bing and Google in this case). I tried Brave a couple of months ago[1], I found the results better than Bing, but without image search it wasn't usable. Now I can give it another go.
Out of curiosity, if you dont want to be 'tied to the larger players', why not use metasearch engines like SearX? If Google does not have a great answer, Bing does, or Mojeek.
I'm referring to a default search engine. Something I can use by default everywhere and I can recommend to others. So it has to provide results based on typical use cases.
First I've heard of a "metasearch" engine. I just tried SearX and it gave me no results for my projects and only a couple for "Mastodon", but the animal not the software.
"Fits linux" is an odd statement. Most of the things you stated can be done by changing the theme of most desktop environments. For performance, I used LXQT recently to revive an old laptop, it's great. https://lubuntu.me/
They don't require interaction. Think about billboards, TV/video ads, sponsorship ads, etc. It's enough for you to just see an ad, to not forget a brand or product exists.
At some point, you might think about a product subconsciously due to any reason, and since you saw the ads, you'll think of a specific company's product and likely rank them higher among "unknown" brands by default. That will bubble up at some point and you'll have a desire for it which you either accept or reject. Most will accept, causing more to accept to be in the group. It's human nature.
It should not be the website's role to provide user controls over this. Having a website require JS to be acceptable is not acceptable. It's possible to use CSS only to check a input element's state, which feels like a workaround. But even then having each site provide its own way to toggle schemes in a pain. Searching for that toggle just adds to the list of settings we need to discover and configure for every notable website we visit. (Is it in the footer? Settings? User menu? Does it even exist or did I miss it?).
The browser should allow per-site toggles for prefers-color-scheme. Just like how (some?) browsers ship with page style selectors using CSS alternate tags. e.g. on Firefox Alt > View > Page Styles.
I would like proper browser toggles. But they are not here, and as long as they are not here, you should always include a toggle. Why is it not acceptable to require JS to be acceptable? You can always provide a pure CSS fallback for those who make the deliberately make the tradeoff of disabling JS. But don't force everybody else to change their whole system color preference just for your website when three lines of JS allow you to create a perfectly integrated toggle.
I think saying "everybody else" is an exaggeration. It's a minority (possibly a major on HN, including me) who tweak colour schemes. Just like how people rarely used alternate stylesheets. And why it took so long to even get "prefers-color-scheme".
Colour preferences are also not black and white, literally. There is a spectrum. Some websites' schemes are too dark or too bright. It's why sites like GitHub provide more than just two options. And why Dark Reader has sliders. In that sense, alternative stylesheets are a much better existing browser-level solution when user intervention is involved. After all, most applications provide a list of color schemes to choose from like in IDEs, terminals, word processors and so on.
The only reason I personally switch from dark to light mode on some websites is because their dark mode isn't what I want and I'd rather put up with the light mode. It's not a preference, just a compromise between two extremes.
Having an absolute stance on this is untenable since it's a complex situation depending on the site's audience, capacity, goal and so on. Let website owners decide, so they can focus on what's important to their audience.
For example, for my blog, I suggest people use the RSS feed or Reader Mode to adjust colours and font sizes to their liking. I'm not going to spend time tweaking two colour schemes for some unknown audience, which would just put me off writing and publishing.
> I think saying "everybody else" is an exaggeration. It's a minority (possibly a major on HN, including me) who tweak colour schemes.
Doesn't matter. "Everybody else" is the literal amount of people who have to change their system color scheme to change the color scheme of your website because you don't want to implement a toggle. You can't argue around that, it is per definition correct. Anyone who has JS enabled could use a toggle, but you don't implement it, so they have to change their system color scheme.
> Colour preferences are also not black and white, literally. There is a spectrum.
And because it's not black and white you force people to change their system color scheme to change your websites color scheme? This is a non-sequitur.
> The only reason I personally switch from dark to light mode on some websites is because their dark mode isn't what I want and I'd rather put up with the light mode. It's not a preference, just a compromise between two extremes.
And because of this you want to make it harder to change color schemes? How does that make any sense?
> Having an absolute stance on this is untenable since it's a complex situation depending on the site's audience, capacity, goal and so on. Let website owners decide, so they can focus on what's important to their audience.
No. Let the website owners give their users options. It's not that hard.
> For example, for my blog, I suggest people use the RSS feed or Reader Mode to adjust colours and font sizes to their liking. I'm not going to spend time tweaking two colour schemes for some unknown audience, which would just put me off writing and publishing.
And that's totally fine! If you don't have separate color schemes, it would make no sense to include a toggle. But if you have separate color schemes, add a toggle.
> No. Let the website owners give their users options. It's not that hard.
If it's not hard, shouldn't that ideal be towards the handful of browser vendors rather than the thousands/millions of website owners? I agree, if you're going out of your way to provide different stylesheets, provide a toggle, otherwise it's kind of a wasted effort anyway. However, my point of argument is the ideals. The idea someone SHOULD provide something. That SHOULD should be towards browser vendors, not website owners.
>And that's totally fine! If you don't have separate color schemes, it would make no sense to include a toggle. But if you have separate color schemes, add a toggle.
I don't think it's fine in your scenario, and the current state of things. If we require websites to individually provide their own toggles, how will the user know a toggle is even available or not? It creates an inconsistent UX where some websites have toggles and others don't. How many Hacker News visitors wasted time looking for a dark mode toggle that doesn't exist?
Which is why having it at the browser-level is necessary. Not to mention storing state, one of my pet peeves is using Incognito and losing my preferences.
It's kind of funny to me because Alternative Stylesheets solved this problem decades ago. Just like how Firefox used to have an RSS icon so we knew a website had RSS without needing to look for it. All of this stuff has been delegated to web extensions, which is barely supported on mobile. So we all need to plaster our websites with what we do and don't support and hope users find them.
> If it's not hard, shouldn't that ideal be towards the handful of browser vendors rather than the thousands/millions of website owners? I agree, if you're going out of your way to provide different stylesheets, provide a toggle, otherwise it's kind of a wasted effort anyway. However, my point of argument is the ideals. The idea someone SHOULD provide something. That SHOULD should be towards browser vendors, not website owners.
I want browser vendors to include a scheme toggle. Until this is present, I want website owners to include a scheme toggle. I don't care about the ideals while they degrade user experience for no good reason. Your website won't break once the browser toggle is implemented.
> I don't think it's fine in your scenario, and the current state of things.
I have no idea what you're trying to say. What I said in your quoted example is: you don't have to include multiple color schemes. Why do you think it's not fine? Why do you expect website owners to include multiple color schemes?
> If we require websites to individually provide their own toggles, how will the user know a toggle is even available or not? It creates an inconsistent UX where some websites have toggles and others don't.
Inconsistent UX is better than non-existent UX. You're asking for website owners not to include a toggle. How is that better than having inconsistent toggles which force me to change my whole OS color scheme just to change the scheme of your website? You're not explaining any advantages this has for the UX. Because it's pretty freaking terrible UX to do so.
>You're asking for website owners not to include a toggle.
I'm not. I'm saying they don't have to include a toggle if they don't see the need to. The decision is on them. No different from their decision to use specific colours, typefaces, text sizes, etc.
If the user has a preference, that toggle should be provided by the browser (the user agent) and the user should seek to get the browser to implement it rather than expect every website owner which has light/dark modes to provide a toggle.
In the current state of things, the browser is telling websites the user prefers a certain colour scheme, which may not even be true. That is really the core issue here if we focus in on dark/light toggles rather than the broader area of alternative stylesheets and ideal UX.
It feels in general that we are in agreement and may be misunderstanding specifics due to a lack of each other's contexts.
> It feels in general that we are in agreement here and may be misunderstanding specifics due to a lack of each other's contexts.
No, we're in fundamental disagreement. My position is very simple: you don't have to include multiple color schemes. If you do, you have to provide a toggle if you want your UX to not be shitty.
> I'm saying they don't have to include a toggle if they don't see the need to. The decision is on them. No different from their decision to use specific colours, typefaces, text sizes, etc.
But it's not like those other decisions. If a website owner decided to serve European customers double the font size that American customers are served, would you say "yeah, no reason to provide a toggle"? Because that's what you're suggesting - serving people different versions of the website without giving them a way to change it without changing their whole OS color scheme. Just for your website. What if I want to use two websites at the same time that follow your idea and want different color schemes? I can't.
> If the user has a preference, that toggle should be provided by the browser (the user agent) and the user should seek to get the browser to implement it rather than expect every website owner which has light/dark modes to provide a toggle.
But until that is implemented, you shouldn't force shitty UX on users. Don't decide for them or force them to switch up their whole OS color scheme just for your website. Don't make software harder to use than it needs to be just for ideological reasons.
> In the current state of things, the browser is telling websites the user prefers a certain colour scheme, which may not even be true.
Yes, so we should provide a toggle to change it. Don't force the user to change their whole OS color scheme.
It should be the user that is granted control of this regardless of the mechanism. It is more convenient for the user to have a JS toggle in the browser, but a less convenient approach can also be provided on the back end. To the back end the only difference to the HTML, which is just string data, is a single class name on a single element.
Are you referring to the GameCube USB adapter? That requires purchasing said adapter (which is out of production, and expensive) and is limited to wired GameCube controllers. The homebrew solution goes much broader than that without needing to purchase more stuff.
The @document and other at-rules mentioned in the article are related to user styles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylish was popular back in the days. As more and more websites moved towards generated CSS classes, it's become more difficult to maintain custom styles.
Whether it's a single file or a single directory doesn't matter much. The git repo is essentially a folder you can download and start locally using the file: protocol. No need for a server or anything.
I could make it into a single file, but I prefer organising modules as separate files and I didn't want to add a build step, so I left it as-is.
> you can download and start locally using the file: protocol
Have you tried doing this? You're using ES6 modules for everything except CryptoJS, but modules are subject to CORS (even for local files), so they'll get blocked.
Thanks for the info. That makes sense given the "11s" configuration I found for those SSIDs. The router is not in their mesh line AFAIK, though most of their home products now support OneMesh, so that line is a bit blurry.
To clarify, I like TP-Link products too. Their PowerLAN products so far have been the most reliable for me and the router's been solid too. It's just really disappointing that an almost (for me) perfect product has this very simple software flaw without any solution other than to hope the manufacturer decides to fix it at some point. I had the same issue with Asus routers, but they were smart enough to open source their software and let others fix pretty much everything for them.
Just to correct myself, "11i" is actually what I saw in the configuration and it's the "Beacon Type". WiFi Analyzer shows them as 11n (2.4Hz) and 11ac (5GHz).
The difference might be that they (including myself) don't ask search engines for facts like "doors of stone release date". They'll search for "doors of stone", find personally reliable sources like Wikipedia, Fandom, Goodreads, browse them and decide on an answer. When sources fail to appear, they'll either refine the search (like "doors of stone rothfuss") or call it a failure and maybe try a different search engine.
This is one the reasons why Brave has been good for me so far. When a relevant Wikipedia article exists, it shows it, even if the title doesn't match. Whereas lately DDG and others don't. In fact, you can see this with "doors of stone". Brave shows "The Kingkiller Chronicle", DDG doesn't at all, Google has it low down in the results.
It also shows Reddit discussions without needing to explicitly filter for it. And I use ad block to remove the AI summariser that takes up half the screen, it's not what I want from a search engine.