I make sites for non-profits regularly and have been asked to add exit/escape buttons a few times. There more time Ive spent thinking about the problem and researching solutions the more I think they are a bad idea.
1. Lots - if not most - traffic is from mobile these days. Most people already know the fastest way to exit a page on mobile - the home button/action. Adding anything else is just adding confusion.
2. Unless you are going to great lengths - ie pre loading a page and maybe dropping parts of the dom and dealing with evidence in the history - are you actually doing anything much to help the user exit your site? How motivated/skilled a person are you defending against?
3. If your exit button is just a glorified link or redirect what is the point? It will still be in the history and if they have slow internet they could end up just staring at your site while the redirect loads.
4. For some organisations having such buttons is more about "showing" they have it than how useful it actually is to the user.
5. I have tried to push for a page/link to basic internet safety information. Educating visitors would be much better than trying to engineer their personal security day.
6. I've struggled to find good academic/research work on such features. Seems like it would be a good area for a UX researcher but I've not found much actual work.
I see these points as reasons why it might not be a good idea, but they don't explain why it is a bad idea.
Other methods for leaving the site still work. Even if the button isn't the best way to leave the site, if it helps in more cases than it hurts then it's a net benefit.
These buttons are essentially panic buttons, and when a person is panicking the big red exit button might end up being the only exit they can find.
This is way outside my area of knowledge, but when under stress do humans actually use things like panic buttons? Or do they fall back on week known patterns of behaviour?
My gut tells me that the big red button might not even get noticed.
But I can imagine that people accessing information about domestic abuse might not necessarily have regular access to internet connected devices, they might not know the best ways to act under stress.
Maybe they won't notice the big red button, but maybe there is some chance that they will notice it, and therefore some chance it will be beneficial to them in that moment.
Pressing the home button on mobile in this scenario leaves the app open in the background with the page still opened. Worse yet, both Android and iOS show thumbnails of apps in the switcher, and it's an MRU so the last used app will be the first one you see if you bring up the switcher. And bringing up the app switcher is very likely to be the first action the attacker would do to see what the victim was doing just now.
Someone would have to gather that data. It's not like a password that can be detached from physical reality. Your date of birth is somewhat inherent to your identity.
Setting aside the feasibility of an amendment and whether an administration would follow it, even just the ability to say yea or nay to anyone accessing information is chilling.
The government is not saying yea or nay, they are just providing proof of age or identity (not necessarily both, whatever the vendor website asks for, and the person allows).
Suppose I want to start a business where I don’t want the liability of having to deal with all the laws about minors. Then I can use the government API to only allow people over whatever age.
That's the intent of course, but it's just as easy to refuse to verify age for certain endpoints or provide incorrect verification. I'm trying to think how an authoritarian government would use this.
Any government can become authoritarian and start messing things up anytime. It’s not like identity/age verification API is cutting edge technology, any group in power that wants to use can use it now or anytime in the future.
That is not a reason for the government to not do something. We entrust them with nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers. Not to mention Snowden already proved the government has back doors into all the big tech companies, so it’s already not a secret who is visiting what website. And FISA courts and secret warrants under gag order and blah blah.
I had a hard time getting Doom to run on my 486. I only had something like 4MB of RAM if I recall correctly so I had to restart my computer, edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT to remove options that I would use to load Windows, and then boot back into DOS to launch DOOM each time I wanted to play it to get that last bit of memory I needed. Then, when I wanted to run Windows, I had to edit the HIMEM.SYS stuff to get it running again. (I was a teenager with no Internet access. I have no idea how I figured out this stuff or where I got information from.)
"norton commander" shell had a user defined menu where you could create short scripts, basically just a chain of DOS commands. As a fellow teenager with no Internet access, I've made a "game" submenu which replaced normal autoexec.bat with a slim one curated for a particular game and rebooted computer right into the game. After you exit the game it'll replace autoexec.bat with the backup of normal one and reboot again back into norton commander.
I have no idea why I needed that level of automation, of course.
My friend had a 486 (We only had a 386), but it would play doom really well.
However, the first step of any gaming session was to reboot the machine with the boot floppy in, which had the right boot settings for gaming performance.
Starting with DOS 6.0 (which came out before DOOM), there was an option to create a menu where you could choose different CONFIG.SYS (and AUTOEXEC.BAT via a variable) options. No need to edit it every time or use a floppy just to get different settings![0]
I recently installed DOS 6.22 on an old laptop. By old, I mean a core2duo with 4GB of ram. It was hilarious to me that I needed to google the correct settings to use to get a game that requires 4MB to work on a machine with 4GB.
My actual goal was to setup QBasic for my son, which I did-- but he thought it was stupid and refused to even let me show him how to code a Hello World app on it. :(
I'm sorry this happened to you. If you were my dad, I would have thought you showing me QBASIC would have been the coolest thing ever.
It kind of reminds me of my dad when he built our first whitebox 486 PC in 1992. Getting to sit on his lap while we messed around in DOS and some games from the era really stuck with me forever. He also loved to mess around in a BBS and would show me how cool it was that we could communicate with other systems at a long distance via modem. :)
Quake was the first game to make heavy usage of the FPU and thus require a Pentium. You could run it on a 486 DX, but the performance would be atrocious.
China and Russia and many others will be very pleased.
I expect a number of military "provocatives" from China in particular in the coming months.