User-"fiendly"

[071] ... [Technology]

In online activities, everything is fine so long as the browser loads the page to start with. Today I had problems when a government portal that required a visit to renew wasn't going further in Opera browser, and got repeated even on MS Edge. Wondering why, the only reason I could guess was on both being Chromium engine based, obviously what doesn't in one, repeats in the other. There wasn't even a pre-requisite mentioned on the preferred browser type. Finally I thought of trying Pale Moon that's based on Firefox. I use it occasionally just to check if what we design works everywhere as intended, and things went smooth. When we as hobbyists take care, wonder why the developers don't bother before making it public, and just optimize it for a particular, assuming all to be on.

There are many such online lapses or shortcomings that we keep encountering. One is the page size that never gets mentioned when you need to print. Most are still designed for Letter size, some for A4. Wish they standardised it or at least convey beforehand. So far as I think, even the PDF printers don't seem to make out the original size that a page is set to, and tries scaling it to what you have set to. Wish there is some kind of Metadata like in images which the software can read and alert if your print settings don't match. Often when combining pages we end up with two paper sizes within a document. Not only looks odd, but also nags on one page going beyond the margins.

Many online puzzles seem to be built seemingly on Flash still, loading only in some browsers. Some sites force you to switch to a particular browser to continue and... Forget it, probably it would be easier to have specific browser for each. Rather, the user needs to be friendly with the setup to accommodate accordingly...