I think chrome is intentionally providing shitty user experience for the blocking of HTTP downloads on HTTPS pages, in order to push developers to fix it faster.

you click a HTTP download link on an HTTPS page and what happens? NOTHING. No error page, no pop-up saying "BLOCKED BECAUSE SECURITY", the browser is just like "did you click? I didn't notice"
it just sticks an error in the JS console.

which I'm sure everyone notices
BTW, this is probably going to get fixed soon, but as of Version 87.0.4280.141 (which seems to be latest) there's a bug which lets you bypass the block, most of the time.

Incognito mode.
Basically chrome won't let you download it because it has the context of you clicking it from a HTTPS page.
But it loses the context if you use the "open link in incognito window" option.
The only reason this wouldn't work is if you're in incognito mode already.
Annoyingly there's only one incognito mode, you can't have incognito mode from other incognito modes.
I demand internal security between my browser windows. none of them should know about each other!
anyway it turns out this trick isn't needed after all.
You can do "save link as", it'll let you select where to save it, then it'll fail.
but it fails in a bypassable way
so you should probably do it this way, as it's less likely to be patched out soon by an angry google dev
I understand that google wants to build a more secure web but a side effect of the everything they're doing is that the web is bitrotting faster
dev1: if we change X to Y, the web will be 2% more secure
dev2: won't that break pages not made in the last 2 years?
dev1: yes. legacy pages will stop working
dev2: how will we support the old pages?
dev1: let me say this as clearly as I can
*puts mouth on the mic* FUCK THEM
chrome.exe

More from foone

Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.


it's like a classic twilight zone episode.

in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.

they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town

the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.

More from Tech

I think about this a lot, both in IT and civil infrastructure. It looks so trivial to “fix” from the outside. In fact, it is incredibly draining to do the entirely crushing work of real policy changes internally. It’s harder than drafting a blank page of how the world should be.


I’m at a sort of career crisis point. In my job before, three people could contain the entire complexity of a nation-wide company’s IT infrastructure in their head.

Once you move above that mark, it becomes exponentially, far and away beyond anything I dreamed, more difficult.

And I look at candidates and know-everything’s who think it’s all so easy. Or, people who think we could burn it down with no losses and start over.

God I wish I lived in that world of triviality. In moments, I find myself regretting leaving that place of self-directed autonomy.

For ten years I knew I could build something and see results that same day. Now I’m adjusting to building something in my mind in one day, and it taking a year to do the due-diligence and edge cases and documentation and familiarization and roll-out.

That’s the hard work. It’s not technical. It’s not becoming a rockstar to peers.
These people look at me and just see another self-important idiot in Security who thinks they understand the system others live. Who thinks “bad” designs were made for no reason.
Who wasn’t there.

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