People with disabilities and accessibility issues (blind, low vision, limited or poor motor function, etc) all have friends and family.

These users buy gifts for their friends and families. Sometimes they even buy groceries for themselves.

That makes these users your potential customers.

Traversing the web for them is already remarkably difficult, but they do it to buy things for their loved ones.

When they traverse the web they do so using a multitude of tools including specialised screen readers or keyboard and mouse controllers.

Do you know what these users do when they come across your super-aesthetic futuristic website and you hijack the selection functionality for their screen reader? They just bounce to another site or service where selection works.

If your site sells something but has been designed for aesthetics only (hijacking the scroll function, removing indicators of selection, disabling right-click functionality etc) you are excluding almost anyone over 50 (that suffers from low vision) and EVERYONE with accessibility requirements. Don't do it.

Amazing design is being able to make something aesthetically gorgeous, while also meeting or exceeding as much of the WCAG guidelines as possible.

WCAG Guidelines https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

Source: We're an accessibility accredited and audited design agency.

Often it's dysfunction; some stake holder or lawyer, etc., having funded the development of some site, observe that one can 'steal' content with copy+paste and freak out, so the front end developers stick this placebo in to shut them up.

There are legitimate use cases; the classic being 'sort a table by clicking on a column heading', where without 'user-select: none;' (or some other mitigation) the column heading will often end up being selected. Often when one creates a site that involves users interacting with text using a traditional pointer device outside of form controls a need for this will appear.

From personal experience I've seen it mostly pulled out as a solution to an XY problem. Normal text tags give you the text cursor. If you don't want the text cursor, why not disable selection? The proper solution is to just apply the default cursor. I haven't experienced your situation before but that sounds completely reasonable; many non-web devs I know don't even know about the dev console.

W3C gets the ultimate blame. These attributes should not even exist. They should have put their foot down and said no to Google.

It's part of making a Progressive Web App: the user should believe they're using a regular smartphone app, and being unable to simply select and copy text goes a long way towards maintaining the illusion.

/s

Should we also force our users to download a 30mb update every week? Just to really emulate the native app experience!

The neat thing about modern SPAs backed with your average feature-flagged CI/CD setup is that you're getting a new 30 mb download each time.

I belive you but could you elaborate for those who don't know what you mean? :)

Continuous Deployment implies at least a few releases per day. Especially for bundled JavaScript (which is most setups) this means you’re invalidating the cache of the entire app at every payload.

Imagine having to download an app update every time someone merged to master. That’s most SPAs.

This can be the case, but if any of the engineers on staff spend a day reading docs it should generally be fixable. A 30mb it should be chunked by the build process in such a way that small updates usually cause cache invalidation for only a few kb worth of files.

If the library you use to build your SPA (React, Vue, etc.) is relatively up to date you should also probably not be sending the whole app over the wire at once to anyone. Routes and components can be set to only load when the user actually attempts to access them inside the SPA, reducing egress significantly.

In Webpack the chunks whose content don't change don't get new file names and so the cache needn't be invalidated for them. Vendor code which is often the largest part, can stay cached over many deployments so long as the versions are locked. Of course, your host could still send no-cache headers and invalidate everything, but that's a problem with the host/cdn.

Sure, I really do hope that engineers do their best to fix things, but in the sad world of contemporary web frontends, I'm a bit pessimistic (then again, if one has to err on the side of build system over-engineering, you're rarey disappointed).

Still, if the deployment system involves frequent node module updates, the vendor files get "dirty" quickly, too.

Sad!? You must not be old enough to remember when we used the global namespace for modules, and there was no console.log(). You wanna talk about sad, try debugging with alert().

I think they are talking about bundling before code-splitting (like we did back in the Browserify days) and that's true, but we have Webpack, or ESModules now.

This linked page alone has 10 MB.

It fits with Linus's MO of making videos of how to build computers and systems 10-100X more powerful than you need.

Insane and grotesque!

Think of all the CPU cycles on all hardware (clients + network devices) and energy used just to fetch web "content" these days.

Might as well return to just burning coal at home to keep warm, thinking of the net effect on the environment.

It's absolutely stupid.

And all the people who don't have $500+ phones, unlimited data plans and fast internet connections.

I used a ~$50 android and pre-paid plans for over a year while traveling Latin America. Wast swaths of the internet are basically inaccessible unless you have tremendous patience and nerves as well as leftover money to throw at the ISPs.

Well it's a modern web page so it's 30mb every time you load it

Browsers have caches

The worst imo are sites that mess with how opening links work. Left click should open the link in the current tab and scroll click or Ctrl+left click should open it in new tab (without switching to that tab). Sites that mess with this and refuse to open links in new tabs really annoy me.

Thankfully floatplane doesn't seem to change any of that but you can't scroll with Vimium's [udjk] keys which kinda sucks.

Oh, yes, I also often have that issue(although I use middle mouse click for that).

I also have these issues with Vim plugins - suddenly websites make scrolling almost unusable with an animation(which is never seen when scrolling with a mouse, touchpad etc. but seems to exist solely to annoy keyboard users), or they can't be scrolled at all, or the whole website UI is built with crazy JS magic so that the plugin can't even find a single link on the whole page.

I don't want to know how bad it must be for blind people who have to rely on automatic tools.

In fairness, this might have just been an overly-broad solution to a certain problem. That is, if you have an element that is clickable and isn't an <a> or <button>, double clicking it can cause page content to be selected when this was not intended.

"user-select" should be disabled more specifically than it is in this case, for sure, but that is what I suspect is really going on here.