There are countless websites that allow you to read for 1 minute or so before they shove a popup in your face. Seems to be triggered strictly by time that the tab is open¹. My automatic overlay remover extension does not defeat them (at least not all of them).
When is time-based event desirable for the user? I can only think of a few scenarios:
- games (e.g. a gold bar or some game reward appears after x amount of time)
- you are buying something like travel tickets and benefit from getting a time-out warning before the server kills the session and you can’t complete your txn.
- maybe stock trading pages that give updated prices
I’m not gaming or gambling online. Not using a browser for stocks. In fact not even shopping. AFAICT, all javascript timers are always only used to bring me garbage. In principle, I would benefit from a browser profile that sabotages all js timers. I don’t know js.. is that feasible or crazy talk? Sure a coder could make a loop that does complex things and they would continue undefeated, but I wonder if I could just neuter the setTimeout() function somehow, would that cancel a noticable amount of shitty behaviors?
Another shitty UX: tabs not populating in the background
¹ Also about tabs being open, I hold control and click to open a bunch of tabs. Back in the days of analog modems, it was useful to open 20+ tabs and go off and do something.. make coffee or lunch, and all tabs would finally be rendered when you return. But now it seems a lot of motherfuckers are making their websites not load until their tab is active. Fuck me. The unloaded tab is precisely the tab I don’t want in front of my face. I visit a page in a background tab and 5 min later I should be able expect that that tab is already loaded. I wonder what happens with HTTrack in these situations (an app I have not yet seen work but one day I’ll get it sorted).
I should not have to control-pagedown across all my tabs to wake them the fuck up. The browser should lie to the js in the tab and say it’s active, no?
So for your first point, I completely agree. The only time I think I'd be ok with this behavior is if it was at the very end of the page/article (which I'm not sure any of them are). Some are so egregious (especially the websites that have more than one) that I will turn on reader view as a potential mitigation.
As to the second point, I'm pretty sure I've seen options for 'load tabs in the background' in browser settings. It would definitely be worth looking into if that's something that bothers you. Personally, it's a non-issue for my specific circumstances.