“What Is a Dickover?”
I started capturing screenshots of every dickover I saw when I started working on this article, and I soon had to give up because I was collecting too many of them. But this one from Tom’s Hardware I actually enjoyed, because their own dickover got dicked over by one of their own fucking ads in a JavaScript Z-axis slapfight.
Read the post on Daring Fireball to learn the definition of the word “dickover”. As John’s often mentioned, adding JavaScript to the modern web was a mistake, and I fully agree. Webpages did not need to become ad-laden, surveillance-filled, SEO-riddled, unoptimised pieces of trash — replete with dickovers, dickbars and enough cookies to feed the Cookie Monster’s voracious appetite for eternity — but here we are.1 Frankly, this design choice is an insult to your attention, and we deserve better.
Five months ago, I disabled JavaScript in Safari with StopTheScript. If you want to experience some semblance of normality, you can selectively enable the extension and notice how quickly pages load when they aren’t filled with shit you didn’t ask for. If you want to go with a scorched-earth policy, you can set it to disable JavaScript by default, then re-enable it for sites that require it (e.g. YouTube, Facebook) or deserve it (e.g. Bear).
I went scorched-earth. I plan to write about my experiences with that soon.
Then again, we wouldn’t have that hilarious example from Tom’s Hardware, which did give me a much-needed laugh today↩