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

There has been a lot of discussion about negative emissions technologies (NETs) lately. While we need to be skeptical of assumed planetary-scale engineering and wary of moral hazard, we also need much greater RD&D funding to keep our options open. A quick thread: 1/10

Energy system models love NETs, particularly for very rapid mitigation scenarios like 1.5C (where the alternative is zero global emissions by 2040)! More problematically, they also like tons of NETs in 2C scenarios where NETs are less essential.
https://t.co/M3ACyD4cv7 2/10


In model world the math is simple: very rapid mitigation is expensive today, particularly once you get outside the power sector, and technological advancement may make later NETs cheaper than near-term mitigation after a point. 3/10

This is, of course, problematic if the aim is to ensure that particular targets (such as well-below 2C) are met; betting that a "backstop" technology that does not exist today at any meaningful scale will save the day is a hell of a moral hazard. 4/10

Many models go completely overboard with CCS, seeing a future resurgence of coal and a large part of global primary energy occurring with carbon capture. For example, here is what the MESSAGE SSP2-1.9 scenario shows: 5/10

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