Why not turn it back on for everyone? If you have to maintain the feature anyway, might as well offer it.

page load times go up

Unless you’re doing something silly a button can’t be more than a hundred bytes or so. That’s only significant on a 90s era cell phone.

Then again most browsers have a print button.

They also won't have to include the print stylesheet (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/Printing#...)

Can’t you just load that when they click it?

1 9 9 5

Back in 1995 all websites shared one global stylesheet.

Every time a new rule was added, you had to wait up to 24 hours for the css servers to propagate.

Yes, the browser has a print function, although you may need a CSS code specific for printing rather than screen, if you want a good result. (If you do not use any CSS at all (which is not so common these days), then you probably don't need a CSS specific for printing either, though.)

There is also bloat from the UI perspective. If you keep adding features they will get harder for users to discover.

You have to delete something every once in a while to make room for something new.

I'm glad you reposted your comment.

If you want to read the data behind many of the decisions, read these papers [0].

[0] https://exp-platform.com

That page has 30 papers so it is basically a (hopefully unintentional) "go fuck yourself".

you're right. I was responding to the initial, deleted comment.

Additionally, that page tripped Canvas Blocker a half dozen times..so I intentionally told it where to go.

Probably faxed them to their friends and family too. I sympathize - paper is really nice

Are adblockers very prevalent in Japan?

Dunno. I haven't worked on a Microsoft property since 2009.

What year was this?

2007? 2008?

Wow, thanks for answering! More recent than I expected!

Sure. If you want to read more, search for ["Jim Pierson" Microsoft "page load time"]. A lot of his work informed what we did at MSN.