[kuschku]

Well, the legal answer clearly places one side in the right (the user has the right to modify websites that are shown on their system however they wish to, and the right to circumvent all measures on that site, as in the countless ABP vs. ... cases has been ruled).

The historical answer does the same, as browsers were explicitly designated User Agents, as their whole purpose is to act in the name of the user, and fulfill whatever the user wishes to, which also clearly places the will of the user over everything a website may wish to.

How you interpret this is obviously left to you...

[Touche]

This is not a legal discussion, no one is saying that the user doesn't have a right to block this behavior.

> The historical answer does the same, as browsers were explicitly designated User Agents, as their whole purpose is to act in the name of the user, and fulfill whatever the user wishes to, which also clearly places the will of the user over everything a website may wish to.

The browser is a User Agent, I agree. This doesn't mean they can predict all user hostile behavior and fix it before it ever happens. Browsers often fix bad behaving websites over time. Recently there's been a lot of effort to fix pages that cause scrolling jank when they load ads in the background.

[ariwilson]

Do you have some legal references to this? Curious. The site also has the legal right to refuse to serve you content, of course.

[kuschku]

ArsTechnica had a list of 6 of the recent court cases between AdBlock Plus and media corporations: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/adblock-plus-win...

There’s been countless cases brought against ad blockers, and all that were about ad blocking, were decided favourable for the blockers.

[Touche]

What does any of this have to do with YouTube blocking PIP?

[kuschku]

Simple, it means that if the browser would decide to force YouTube into allowing PIP, that would be the browsers legal (and moral right).

Additionally, there’s a precedent that users want to be able to control what a site does, and are willing to take extra steps to achieve this, so a browser should implement such functionality ideally in the first place.

[Touche]

There are already numerous examples where browsers intervene to stop user-hostile pages. The reason pop-up ads largely don't exist any more is because browsers intervened to kill them.

[kuschku]

Exactly, and the same should happen here. Users should be able to force PiP.