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Should browsers offer site-specific user preference controls? (yes!)

Stefan Judis dreams about what could be made possible in browsers in this short opinion-piece.

Users can set an OS-level or browser-level preference for light or dark mode, but there’s currently little support for configuring this on a per-site basis. What if you simply prefer a particular mode on a specific site, even if it goes against your global settings?

Stefan highlights Safari’s website-specific controls menu, which can only be accessed after enabling them via toolbar settings. Here, users can set preferences on page zoom, autoplay, and permissions including location and camera access, on a per-site basis. Stefan feels other preference should be configurable here too.

Stefan would like to see ‘preference queries’ not only easily configurable globally, but easily overrideable on a per-site basis. These include:

• prefers-reduced-motion
• prefers-reduced-transparency
• forced-colors
• prefers-color-scheme
• prefers-reduced-data

Hopefully one brave browser will lead the way and this could become a reality one day.

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