WHICH IS OKAY, if we're talking about security/privacy, but performance ... not really. Let the market (and the users) decide. If a site takes forever to load, and scrolling is impossible because it takes ages to scroll, and burns a mark in your palm in that time, then maybe you'll reconsider visiting that site ever again.
WHICH IS OKAY, if we're talking about security/privacy, but performance ... not really.
It's not automatically OK to break functionality even for security/privacy reasons, IMHO. Browsers are used for many useful purposes that do not involve visiting sites run by large organisations with full-time development teams assigned to ongoing maintenance. Intranets. Embedded UIs in devices. Personal sites full of useful information but with no-one actively maintaining them.
The number of breaking changes browser developers have been willing to make in recent years does not bode well for the future of the Web, a platform which became what it is today precisely because it was a known target for developers and for a few years the industry standards actually meant something.
The Brave New Web is one dominated by ego-stroking contests between the major browser developers and huge, centralised sites with effectively unlimited resources run by just a handful of organisations. Notice that neither users nor original content creators appear in that previous description. The original author here is quite right to call the big players out for that. We saw Microsoft's infamous embrace-and-extend strategy and the way the Web was held back for years as a result. We should be just as wary when the likes of Google sing the same song.
And there are non evergreen browsers for those environments.
I agree that unilateral moves are bad for the web, but the reality was always that. Vendors have their own agendas, and usually the overlap is large enough.
Plus the change was always there too. Framesets work just as 'fine' today as they did back in '96, and the same goes for tables, divs, and falling snowflakes in the background DHTML snippets. The churn we see today is because the web became a lot more diverse, a lot of things were and are still live on the edge, some are in terms of performance and creative expression (just think about CSS Houdini, giving even lower level access gradually to the rendering pipeline), some in terms of security (because they depend on some implementation detail of browsers - such as CSRF protections, that took a decade to get sort of right with the Same Origin policy).
Then chrome Devs say to use autocomplete=something-stupid to get the specification behaviour of 'off' WTF is that?!
Donate to Firefox.
Chrome is the new IE
Websites consist of code to be interpreted by browsers as they see fit, for the benefit of their users. Those users do not necessarily want exactly the experience the site authors want them to have.
So, along the same lines, it may make sense to improve the UI for autocompleting users, or for hinting about the use of the field, to make it easier for sysadmins. But that shouldn't break the more common case of handling sites that just think they're Too Special or Too Important to allow saving login information.
And I would actually argue that blocking before closing the tab should be a decision up to the developer, not the browser.
The shop controls the server the user rightly controls the experience on their machine. The browser vendor provides an application that runs on the users machine. If the shop doesn't like it they can pound sand or suggest the user would be better off with a different browser.
They can perhaps rightly say that the deviation from standard is unfriendly or sub optimal but one would hope they wouldn't appeal to imaginary authority derived from a bad analogy.
A raven isn't like a writing desk and a client server interaction isn't like a user visiting a physical store.
Analogies can serve to communicate but when you use them to prove a point the only thing you prove is your lack of understanding of the matter.
I didn't realize until now that it doing the right thing from my (the user's) perspective was because it was breaking a web standard, but damn if I don't find it useful.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Fo...
The changes some browsers have made to autoplay videos or alerts do not contradict what is in the manual.