I'm referring to a default search engine. Something I can use by default everywhere and I can recommend to others. So it has to provide results based on typical use cases.
First I've heard of a "metasearch" engine. I just tried SearX and it gave me no results for my projects and only a couple for "Mastodon", but the animal not the software.
>I wonder what's different about our searches and expectations.
The difference might be that they (including myself) don't ask search engines for facts like "doors of stone release date". They'll search for "doors of stone", find personally reliable sources like Wikipedia, Fandom, Goodreads, browse them and decide on an answer. When sources fail to appear, they'll either refine the search (like "doors of stone rothfuss") or call it a failure and maybe try a different search engine.
This is one the reasons why Brave has been good for me so far. When a relevant Wikipedia article exists, it shows it, even if the title doesn't match. Whereas lately DDG and others don't. In fact, you can see this with "doors of stone". Brave shows "The Kingkiller Chronicle", DDG doesn't at all, Google has it low down in the results.
It also shows Reddit discussions without needing to explicitly filter for it. And I use ad block to remove the AI summariser that takes up half the screen, it's not what I want from a search engine.
Same here. Much like Firefox, I think it's important to use a search index that isn't tied to the larger players (Bing and Google in this case). I tried Brave a couple of months ago[1], I found the results better than Bing, but without image search it wasn't usable. Now I can give it another go.
"Fits linux" is an odd statement. Most of the things you stated can be done by changing the theme of most desktop environments. For performance, I used LXQT recently to revive an old laptop, it's great. https://lubuntu.me/
They don't require interaction. Think about billboards, TV/video ads, sponsorship ads, etc. It's enough for you to just see an ad, to not forget a brand or product exists.
At some point, you might think about a product subconsciously due to any reason, and since you saw the ads, you'll think of a specific company's product and likely rank them higher among "unknown" brands by default. That will bubble up at some point and you'll have a desire for it which you either accept or reject. Most will accept, causing more to accept to be in the group. It's human nature.
>You're asking for website owners not to include a toggle.
I'm not. I'm saying they don't have to include a toggle if they don't see the need to. The decision is on them. No different from their decision to use specific colours, typefaces, text sizes, etc.
If the user has a preference, that toggle should be provided by the browser (the user agent) and the user should seek to get the browser to implement it rather than expect every website owner which has light/dark modes to provide a toggle.
In the current state of things, the browser is telling websites the user prefers a certain colour scheme, which may not even be true. That is really the core issue here if we focus in on dark/light toggles rather than the broader area of alternative stylesheets and ideal UX.
It feels in general that we are in agreement and may be misunderstanding specifics due to a lack of each other's contexts.
> No. Let the website owners give their users options. It's not that hard.
If it's not hard, shouldn't that ideal be towards the handful of browser vendors rather than the thousands/millions of website owners? I agree, if you're going out of your way to provide different stylesheets, provide a toggle, otherwise it's kind of a wasted effort anyway. However, my point of argument is the ideals. The idea someone SHOULD provide something. That SHOULD should be towards browser vendors, not website owners.
>And that's totally fine! If you don't have separate color schemes, it would make no sense to include a toggle. But if you have separate color schemes, add a toggle.
I don't think it's fine in your scenario, and the current state of things. If we require websites to individually provide their own toggles, how will the user know a toggle is even available or not? It creates an inconsistent UX where some websites have toggles and others don't. How many Hacker News visitors wasted time looking for a dark mode toggle that doesn't exist?
Which is why having it at the browser-level is necessary. Not to mention storing state, one of my pet peeves is using Incognito and losing my preferences.
It's kind of funny to me because Alternative Stylesheets solved this problem decades ago. Just like how Firefox used to have an RSS icon so we knew a website had RSS without needing to look for it. All of this stuff has been delegated to web extensions, which is barely supported on mobile. So we all need to plaster our websites with what we do and don't support and hope users find them.
I think saying "everybody else" is an exaggeration. It's a minority (possibly a major on HN, including me) who tweak colour schemes. Just like how people rarely used alternate stylesheets. And why it took so long to even get "prefers-color-scheme".
Colour preferences are also not black and white, literally. There is a spectrum. Some websites' schemes are too dark or too bright. It's why sites like GitHub provide more than just two options. And why Dark Reader has sliders. In that sense, alternative stylesheets are a much better existing browser-level solution when user intervention is involved. After all, most applications provide a list of color schemes to choose from like in IDEs, terminals, word processors and so on.
The only reason I personally switch from dark to light mode on some websites is because their dark mode isn't what I want and I'd rather put up with the light mode. It's not a preference, just a compromise between two extremes.
Having an absolute stance on this is untenable since it's a complex situation depending on the site's audience, capacity, goal and so on. Let website owners decide, so they can focus on what's important to their audience.
For example, for my blog, I suggest people use the RSS feed or Reader Mode to adjust colours and font sizes to their liking. I'm not going to spend time tweaking two colour schemes for some unknown audience, which would just put me off writing and publishing.
It should not be the website's role to provide user controls over this. Having a website require JS to be acceptable is not acceptable. It's possible to use CSS only to check a input element's state, which feels like a workaround. But even then having each site provide its own way to toggle schemes in a pain. Searching for that toggle just adds to the list of settings we need to discover and configure for every notable website we visit. (Is it in the footer? Settings? User menu? Does it even exist or did I miss it?).
The browser should allow per-site toggles for prefers-color-scheme. Just like how (some?) browsers ship with page style selectors using CSS alternate tags. e.g. on Firefox Alt > View > Page Styles.
Are you referring to the GameCube USB adapter? That requires purchasing said adapter (which is out of production, and expensive) and is limited to wired GameCube controllers. The homebrew solution goes much broader than that without needing to purchase more stuff.
First I've heard of a "metasearch" engine. I just tried SearX and it gave me no results for my projects and only a couple for "Mastodon", but the animal not the software.