I understand that you're referring to the username, not the expletive...but who is still browsing HN on a machine where it's a problem when you click a link and it's unexpectedly a PDF? That mattered several years ago, but I exoect most users probably have embedded PDF viewers in their browsers today.
Honestly? Because I'm setup to download PDFs automatically, and the indicator that this has happened is too inconspicuous. So I often click a link twice or even three times before realizing its a PDF, and then I have to clean up 2 or 3 files.
Every time I clean my downloads folder I find a few "(1)" strings appended to several duplicates I've downloaded by mistake. Mostly due to the UX issue you mentioned but I'm also mildly ADHD.
Kinda makes you wonder why browsers don't have a built in (content based) deduping feature. I'm sure some users actually desire this behavior now that they're used to it.
Can anyone recommend a Firefox extension that can dedupe and clean your downloads for you?
Why not just use a general deduping utility and unleash it on your Downloads folder? That will cover files that have been removed from the browser's downloads list, too.
> your phone starts downloading a large PDF instead (4MB, what the what?).
I agree about the parent point of marking PDF as such but still feel compelled to point out that a 4 MB PDF is not significantly bigger than a lot of regular pages that are posted to HN.
In this very moment the currently highest ranked link, which is just a regular web page, on the HN front page had a total network payload of 3,937 KiB according to Google PageSpeed.
I sympathize with what you are saying though in general, and I think it is sad that so much mobile bandwidth is needed in order to read stuff.
The way that I personally get around this is that when I am on mobile I mostly restrict myself to reading HN comments instead of clicking through on any of the featured links themselves. But depending on how you like to use your phone I realize this might not be feasible to switch habit into.
Except a lot of regular pages are just pages and so it is trivial to read them at 20kb size because you obviously run your browser with extensions that block the loading of the vast majority of resources on the page until you whitelist them. A 4mb PDF is a single 4mb file. A 4mb webpage is more like 100 separate files, most of which can be entirely forbidden from loading at all, and many of which can be set to load only once tapped on (like images).
> you obviously run your browser with extensions that block the loading of the vast majority of resources on the page until you whitelist them
I think most people do not do this on mobile. Even among the HN crowd. For example, on iPhone that I use, Safari does not support extensions. So for most people on mobile the site will download everything.
The issue for me isn't viewing the pdf but getting rid of it afterwards.
Almost all of my storage used on my phone other media are PDFs, but I can't split them up like I would on a PC e.g. I want to keep the textbooks and datasheets but I don't need every paper I've ever read.
