Aside from this being about design and not HTML5, is anyone else not surprised they didn't include "550 social +1, like, tweet, twat buttons"?

Look at that website: there's a social banner, a social footer, a social sidebar, animated gifs for ads. Make that 15 lousy web design trends.

I keep wondering: Does anyone actually use these social buttons?

I tried a few times but the experience has always been so terrible and inconsistent that I've long reverted to simply sharing the good old copy/paste way.

> I keep wondering: Does anyone actually use these social buttons?

The suppliers of said social buttons do; every time you see one while you're logged into FB / G+ / Twitter, a hit of you visiting that site is registered at said parties, and they can all, thanks to the prevalence of these sharing buttons, track your internet usage.

This should be regulated somehow (yeah, I know, I sound like an 19th century guy). But probably lobbyist won't give up on that easily. I have disabled all that crap in my adblock, but there are millions of people who are not that savvy / aware etc.

My friend from Germany told me that in some (but not all) the pages, there are dummy social buttons loaded by default, you have to "enable" them. Try any article at [1]. It actually displays grayed placeholders only [2], and things are fetched from G/T/FB only when you click it - you can see in HTTP console.

[1] http://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de [2] http://i.imgur.com/hkQXEiX.png

Disable 3rd party cookies, tracking woes averted.

Unless they use any other tracking system, like ETags[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag#Tracking_using_ETags

Disable fetching any third party resources of all sorts, problem solved.

Obviously, rulesets should be tuples of (source pattern, resource type, destination pattern), not silly lists ("allow google.com", huh?) like most browser extensions do.

However, there are some sites that stupidly execute JS that is vital to the running of the page after attempting to initialize Google Analytics or other services. The end result is that they get a "Cannot call method 'bleh' of undefined" error which prevents the rest of their JS executing, hence broken page. If I'm really interested in actually loading the page, then I have to resort to allowing the trackers to run. sigh.

Unfortunately, I can't see how this could be averted, stopping short of an extension which catches all uncaught exceptions, then tries to forcefully remove all JS which is meant to interact with 3rd parties. It could be done either via pattern matching, because Google Analytics code looks much the same on most peoples sites, or it could be through something more fun, like https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs (who would of thought there would actually be a proper use case for something like that??)