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?