I really wish it existed under its own category somehow

Softcore porn? I think it already exists within this category

What do you mean by traditional material?

Things that have in the past been used in fiction to evoke familiar experiences to help people relate to it, or to convey something more concisely by building with concepts the audience can be assumed to be familiar with. For instance I’m reading Dracula right now, and while it does a great job of being comprehensible and relatable to a contemporary audience, I imagine it would be experienced somewhat different by someone living in the time it was written, who probably would have had more direct experience with things like the behavior of horses, letter writing, and cultural attitudes towards aristocracy and war pre-WW1. Though the parallels between letters and digital communications probably help a lot, reliance on them and the fear of having those communications restricted or tampered with is definitely relatable.

I can see your argumentation being followed by misguided production management, but I doubt it’s necessary or can positively influence world-building.

I don’t think it’s correct to attribute this phenomenon to cynical marketing efforts, there’s a vast amount of amateur fiction in this vein. Personally a large portion of my dreams center around videogame elements, and settings and scenarios that are partly or entirely explicitly artificial constructions are what I tend towards imagining while awake. Art reflects the minds of artists and audiences so it’s a natural direction for it to take.

“Recent anime works will show things like a level-up gauge that appears when characters tap the air, even though there’s no in-setting reason for them to have a personal interface like that. I may just be getting old, but it really makes me wonder: ‘What is going on here?’ It just doesn’t work for me.“

My idea on what’s going on here is, people find it impossible to imagine what is entirely alien to them. Fiction uses various tricks to bridge this gap for its audience; by describing familiar experiences in a fantastical context, it draws you into its imagined reality. But for people who exercise little actual agency in their real lives, don’t go outside much, and play a lot of videogames, the traditional material probably isn’t stuff they can relate to as well as people in the past could. A fictional world that has the mechanics of a videogame is a natural direction to go because it will be easier for modern people to imagine than a fictional world where nobody uses phones or computers.

That’s a good point, I guess I haven’t been too aware of all that stuff.

The rights to search sure are, but it’s more like Google happens to be the one paying it right now. It could be Microsoft or Yahoo or anyone.

I don’t buy that what they are paid reflects the value of their search rights. Google has antitrust interest in the continued existence of Firefox, that’s why they would pay them, doesn’t matter what they say it’s for.

Isn’t that their main source of revenue?

Occasionally when I do web stuff I look into the big frameworks but quickly get overwhelmed and go back to simple html/css/js, so yeah I kind of just don’t get what the point is or why anyone needs or wants complexity there. Large websites always do most stuff serverside anyway it seems, so where is this complexity even getting used? It is very mysterious to me. Suspect Google etc. are pushing stuff no one needs in this regard as well to move the web towards something only they can handle.

They are funded by Google. I much prefer the “some random guys or whoever will fork their code” model of software for this sort of thing.

What’s stopping web standards from being made simple or unchanging enough for a smaller project to maintain a functional web browser?

Yeah that did seem pretty rude.

If they provided you the service advertised a refund is rightly at their discretion.