I've become a big fan of hitting the slash key to focus the search box, escape to unfocus and also tab for filling out the suggested sentence while maintaining focus to the search box

Basic static HTML version.

Little popups when I highlight any text. /s

An easy mechanism to report bugs or other issues without leaving the page

Being able to make notes about users like you can on Mastodon.

Not using JavaScript for something CSS can do.

Reddit Nested/Threaded Comments — A tree-style comment system that visually nests replies, making conversation threads easier to follow in complex discussions.

I wish bank sites allowed more fine tuned control. Email me about my accounts if x amount of money moves and use my nicknames not the *number thing. Let me set my savings to only allow withdrawls to my checking and not allow atm access.

For any website that has some sort of search or filtering, a function to exclude items. A couple examples of this that have annoyed me enough to still remember them:

• Trying to set a filter for every GPU with more than 12GB of RAM, excluding the 3060. I had to instead select like two dozen chipsets manually.

• This is now fixed, but you didn't used to be able to filter excluding game tags on Steam. This made more general tags useless, as people over-apply them. For example, CS2 Marvel Rivals, Black Desert, and DbD are all tagged as strategy games, so without the option to filter them out, it was way harder to browse.

• On Lemmy, there doesn't seem to be any search operators, nonetheless '-'. Given how useless the search already is, and the fact that nothing gets indexed on the major search engines, finding anything on Lemmy is impossible.

Not requiring you to sign up to see the page contents.

Not consuming more than 10MB of RAM

This please, everywhere https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

Only the one server connection required for all content. At the very least, only your own servers. I will not whitelist any third party server another website can access. If you load some generic 3rd party script, your stuff does not exist. I don't want any scripts running at all.

FIDO2, Passkeys or whatever you want to call Webauthn.

Seriously I’m so burned out on glitchy forms that can’t even get the most basic username, password fields right and want to fight autocomplete all day, and I don’t want SMS-based 2FA or the absolute worst, “mAgIC LiNKs.” 🥴

Fuck.

I don't know if it's a good idea for sites to do so, but I personally hate websites having some sort of timeout and then killing the session if they don't detect activity. I never walk away from my system with it unlocked. Sometimes I need to do other things on another desktop, and I don't want to be forced to manually click things to keep the session live. I will grant that probably, there are people who don't do that, but this really is obnoxious.

Also, very short timeouts on 2FA systems that use stuff like email. I've had antispam systems greylist authentication emails and that create problems with sites that have short timeouts.

If your website is light-mode, also have a dark mode. And respect the user's requested dark-mode setting from the browser via prefers-color-scheme. Don't require them to use the site in some default mode to go through the login process and log in and explicitly set the thing in your internal account settings. That's especially annoying for users who may have something like time-based modes on their system (I don't, always want dark mode, but it's extra obnoxious for them.)

I think that the entire "m." convention for forcing use of a mobile site

Wikipedia being a prominent example of this practice

is a terrible idea. It means that mobile users inadvertently send links to desktop users that force a mobile-mode page, which is virtually never desirable for the desktop users. I don't know what the state-of-the-art here is in web dev, but I am very certain that there are better options than that, because lots of sites manage to have a mobile site without doing this. If you want to have a way to force mobile or force desktop mode in your URL, fine. But for God's sake, don't make that the default. I have spent more time manually stripping "m." off Wikipedia URLs on discussion sites so as not to inconvenience desktop users when I happen to be using mobile, or stripping it out of URLs from mobile users when I'm on a desktop...and yes, there are extensions to help with this, but it really shouldn't be a problem in the first place, I think.

I like my browser's back button to work. Some sites maintain session state that cause things to break when moving back to a prior page. Short of some obvious examples, where irrevocable changes to state have occurred (e.g. making a payment at a bank to someone) and it's obviously not possible to back things out, I want to be able to use my browser's features.

Discourse Moderation System — assigns user privileges based on five trust levels (0 to 4), where new users start at level 0 with limited abilities and, as they gain experience and participation, they progressively earn more rights to moderate and contribute, with level 4 users having nearly full community moderation powers short of staff status.

peertubes webtorrents. please just let me download the video. I'll even help serve it.