Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-ancient-browsers.html

by artogahr • 4 years ago

284 270 4 years ago

complang.tuwien.ac.at

Featurism is usually inverse proportional to content, and those who have content generally value being readable.

(as related to features such as HTML frames and tables)

Thanks for this quote attributed to Bernd Paysan I can now cite rather than formulating this over and over (for CSS grids, subgrids, columns, flexbox, functions, variables/custom properties and whatnot).

badsectoracula5• 4 years ago

I can understand frames, but tables are useful even for plain text content and even lynx and emacs (eww, not w3, not sure if they are related though) have support for them.

hmry• 4 years ago

It might be talking about pages that used tables for styling/layout

NotYourLawyer2• 4 years ago

My modern version of this is browsing with JavaScript disabled. Most of the sites that don’t work weren’t worth my time anyway.

rrwo6• 4 years ago

I disagree. Using AJAX to hit internal APIs to load or update content improves performance of the site, and can make it easier to maintain.

badsectoracula5• 4 years ago

I can't say i've seen a single site where in practice that worked as advertised. Also some times it introduces UX annoyances (e.g. back button not working as expected).

It is one of those things where in theory if absolutely everything was done right and no other stuff was done differently it can work. E.g. if the only difference between a JS-enabled and a JS-disabled version of the site was the content change and nothing else (no additional JS frameworks, functionality or whatever) then yes it most likely can be faster (though for the difference to be noticeable the site needs to be rather heavy in the first place).

Problem being that in practice this comes with a bunch of other baggage that not only throws the benefit out of the window but introduces a bunch of other issues as well.

b112• 4 years ago

I disagree. Using AJAX to hit internal APIs to load or update content improves performance of the site, and can make it easier to maintain.

The reality is, with node junk, the average site uses 10mb of js, taking 5s to render, to show 1kb of text.

Get rid of that 10mb of js, all those fonts, and you don't need to update only part of a page.

It will load and render in 10ms.

lucideer2• 4 years ago

This is what Twitter does. It's possibly the least performant major website I've used.

Conditional loading certainly can improve perf. in theory. I've yet to see any evidence it does so in practice. The aggregate of bundle-size, bundle-parse, client-side execution resource-usage & added latency of the plethora of metadata normally bundled with API responses is more than enough to negate any actual perf. gains.

As for "easier to maintain", I've never seen anyone even try to make that argument in theory, nevermind practice. Pretty sure it's widely accepted even by advocates of this architecture that it's a trade-off of perf. gains for ease-of-maintenance losses.

weberer2• 4 years ago

Is there any evidence of this? All the sites I've seen that use extra requests to load text always seem to take multiple seconds to load. Whereas most pages that use server side rendering generally load under 100ms.

tannhaeuser7• 4 years ago

The argument is that JS-heavy site design indicates worthless content on average. Not that it's easier to maintain for the site owner (which might or might not be the case), or more realistically, creates job opportunities for "web developers".

DonHopkins• 4 years ago

Yeah, who needs google maps anyway? Just use the Xerox PARC Map Viewer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer

NotYourLawyer2• 4 years ago

Yeah, well. There are a few things that are worth whitelisting.

tannhaeuser7• 4 years ago

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapscii

forgotmypw1717• 4 years ago

Google Maps is one of the sites I still whitelist, but I often reconsider this decision, and I'm ready to find a replacement.

Today's Google Maps is a shadow of its original self, which did have a no-JS version, by the way. It has gradually gotten simultaneously heavier, less convenient, more annoying, and less useful, and I've just about had it.

Just off the top of my head, it no longer displays zip codes, takes a long time to load, has missing street names on the map, often promotes features I do not want while taking away features I do want, and is covered so thick with paid-promotion items that I can barely find somewhere to click that isn't an ad.

Altho2• 4 years ago

You're right if you're using the web in order to display content. That was the case in the 90s. In this case, yes, a simple index.html with a <h1> and <p> is fast, responsive etc. But with webapps being more and more common one could argue that displaying text is not necessarily the web's main purpose anymore. If you're trying to access figma with a text based browser it's gonna crap the bed, so it fails the test, but is it a relevant test though ? The web is bloated but it didn't bloated just because engineers were bored, it had genuine use cases where doing more than just displaying text was needed. And it wasn't ONLY for marketing purposes (but it played a big part i'm sure)

mattl• 4 years ago

Webapps vs websites.

Should be no need for any website to require JavaScript to function.

tannhaeuser7• 4 years ago

There's also SEO as a simple reason that JS-heavy sites correlate inversely with content quality. Yes I know googlebot attempts a time/memory-bound render of a JS site to arrive at a DOM for text extraction, but this won't work with other search engines, and will never work as well and timely as providing static HTML to googlebot, no matter what.

SuperSandro20002• 4 years ago

I think it's worth my time to not need to go to the post box every day and exchange dead trees.

danjoredd6• 4 years ago

What does physical mail have to do with anything? You can get email without Javascript in your browser

jmclnx• 4 years ago

I use noscript for this, plus I am running into sites that presents a screen stating "Cloudflare is checking". That Cloudflare check requires Javascript enabled. So I just move on, that to me means that site cannot even count me as a 'view'. Makes things a bit easier for me too :)

ecmascript2• 4 years ago

Wow. I wonder how you use stuff like instant messaging, music streaming and so forward. Do you also skip all browser based desktop apps because you hate Javascript so much?

Ignorance is bliss I suppose.

danjoredd6• 4 years ago

No need to get upset at the guy. Its their choice to use Javascript in the way they want, rather than let any site that wants it use it. Most websites with articles don't need Javascript, and only use it to push ads/paywall articles. If there is a webapp that they want to use, they can always whitelist it.

As for music streaming and instant messaging, not everyone has/needs Discord, Slack, Teams, or anything like that. If you absolutely need it for work, just whitelist it. No problemo. And, not everyone streams music. I barely used Spotify myself until I got an office job and needed something to fill the boredom.

The issue isn't about stopping Javascript as a whole. The issue is about permissions management. Not every site needs it, so not every site should have it. If you need it to work for a webapp, just enable it.

derane• 4 years ago

wie kommt das hier hoch ? 16 Points ?

martin_a3• 4 years ago

Please speak English, fellow German, it's more polite.

rrwo6• 4 years ago

This aged well.

tiborsaas• 4 years ago

Also known as ideology driven browsing.

dave84• 4 years ago

The timestamp on the downloads provided on the install page are March 5 1999, and March 6 2000 which may give an indication as to this articles age.

myfonj2• 4 years ago

HTTP headers tell

    Last-Modified: Sun, 07 Mar 1999 17:07:32 GMT

First Archive.org capture is from 1997 [1] and there really are some additions in current version since then.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19970106091058/http://www.complan...

artogahr2• 4 years ago

Hey, thanks for this! I looked online for the release date of the emacs extension he's using, which dates back to 1997. But he mentioned it being quite old so I didn't know what to put as the (year).

badsectoracula5• 4 years ago

Considering all the discussions about JavaScript and sites with primarily text requiring it, this looks like the more things change, the more they remain the same :-P. Also see Wirth's Plea for Lean Software[0] from 1995 for another "timeless" issue.

I did find this bit interesting too...

Apart from this practical reason, there's a principal one: The first time I invoked Netscape, it said that it is obsolete and refuses to work. I don't use software that thinks it knows better than I when I should stop using it.

...considering the modern trend for autoupdating software. The author (after this paragraph) also considers availability, but another issue is if the software is something one would like to use even if it is available - for instance, personally i never liked using a version of Paint Shop Pro after version 7 since i found all of them a degradation. I can use PSP7 just fine though (even on Linux via Wine) - imagine if the software decided by itself that it is too old to run or to replace itself with a new version against my wishes (this is something a lot of software does nowadays).

From a user's perspective this also has implications on preserving backwards compatibility for foundational functionality programs rely on.

[0] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf

tannhaeuser7• 4 years ago

Firefox on Ubuntu (which I'm not using anymore for these and other reasons) and presumably on other OSs does exactly that: refuse to open new tabs/sites once every two weeks or so, telling me "one more thing we need to do" ie self-update. So you're loosing all your browsing context, though FF does a better job restoring it after restart than it used to, but still that's user-hostile and self-important as fuck. And there's also a "principal" reason why I can't stand this: that the Web is now 30 years old, past its peak, so if browsers still need to update bi-weekly for new features and experiments, this in combination with lack of browser diversity proves without any shade of doubt there's something very wrong with the incentives for browser development, the Google/Mozilla browser cartel, and the evolution of "web standards".

jakub_g• 4 years ago

Go to Firefox settings and disable auto-update? `about:config` > `app.update.auto: false`

badsectoracula5• 4 years ago

Yeah that is annoying, though personally i find browsers as the one category of software where i think this is fine, mainly because of security updates (it sucks that they tend to come with UI updates but at least on Firefox so far the main UI is fairly customizable and have made my own) but also because they are online software anyway.

weberer2• 4 years ago

This is infuriating to me as well. And the stupid Firefox restart dinosaur always comes up at the worst possible time. I would have switched to a new browser years ago, but Firefox seems to be the only one that supports vertical tabs.

zinekeller• 4 years ago

and presumably on other OSs

Nope, it only happens when something outside changed Firefox's files (in this case when Ubuntu swapped files because dpkg updated Firefox). This never happens* in Windows and macOS (it might nag, but you can definitely dismiss it). It seems that johnchristopher has a suggestion to disable auto-updates on a specific application in Debian and Ubuntu (haven't tested it though): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33202052

* At least using their official installers. I'm specifically excluding using Chocolatey/brew/other loose-file update mechanism or your bonkers enterprise solution insists on using loose files and not rely on *.msi/*.app/*.pkg.

johnchristopher• 4 years ago

On Ubuntu/Debian, a work-around is to put Firefox on hold: sudo apt-mark hold <package-name>

Will not work with snap though.

forgotmypw1717• 4 years ago

Gosh, that is frustrating to even read about.

The first time it happened, I would get rid of whatever software was involved in causing it and never use it again, except for testing purposes.

I completely agree with you about everything else too. The Web is mature enough that I can use a well-tested website with a 20-year-old browser.

There is no technical reason to not have a minimum-viable web browser with a smaller attack surface that doesn't need upgrades for months or even years.

And, in fact, such browsers exist, and I can browse most of the Web that I need with them. I just have to ignore the shitty mainstream, which I am more than happy to do.

mellavora2• 4 years ago

Firefox on Mac. I have this problem as well, even with "autoupdate" set to true. Also, if I am browsing in the middle of an auto update, it refuses to open new tabs.

And each update logs me out of my password manager

Worse, now this is happening to Thunderbird. Wasn't an issue until about a month ago. Now I need to re-install Thunderbird every few weeks because they've pushed an update.

When from my point of view, as a user, I haven't seen a new feature which I truly wanted in over 5 years, maybe more like 10.

lupire4• 4 years ago

Why do you believe software has peaked and has nothing new to potentially offer?

bobbob1921• 4 years ago

This reminds me of iOS apps that as soon as you open them require an update to the latest version and won’t let you proceed any further (in the app) until you click OK/do the update. I always make it a point to go leave a one star review (or update my existing review to one star), and point this out as the reason

cercatrova• 4 years ago

the Web is now 30 years old, past its peak, so if browsers still need to update bi-weekly for new features and experiments, this in combination with lack of browser diversity proves without any shade of doubt there's something very wrong with the incentives for browser development, the Google/Mozilla browser cartel, and the evolution of "web standards".

Or maybe new features are still coming out in the W3C specs and need to be implemented. Did you know CSS now has a parent selector, or that JS will be getting functional piping soon?

jasonlotito• 4 years ago

That this complaint is pointing at Firefox when it's not Firefox at all, is interesting. How many things do we associate with one thing when it's actually something else entirely.

It's a shame, really.

scarface74• 4 years ago

The issue with that when it comes to browsing is that old browsers have security issues that hopefully are patched, and more secure protocol versions.

efficax• 4 years ago

i don’t want most of my software to auto update but i certainly want the browser, which ingests untrusted data from unknown sources constantly, to get bug fix updates automatically.

lupire4• 4 years ago

That's your choice. Some other people only visit trusted sites.

neogodless• 4 years ago

I don't use software that thinks it knows better than I when I should stop using it.

First, it's not software that thinks it knows better. It's whoever maintains that software. Humans. Who read and write the code that makes that software work, and who find problems with the software and fix it.

Now, with that out of the way, and the assumption that someone maintaining software should notify you if the version you have has outstanding problems, yes you should still be in control of making the decision to continue using it, or to get a newer version. But you should be OK with software maintainers having thoughts and opinions about whether specific versions are problematic.

foobarian• 4 years ago

I blame black hats. If it weren't for viruses and exploits there would be a lot less pressure to keep things updated. Remember how much flak Microsoft got for vulnerabilities pretty much ever since Windows got a networking stack? Meanwhile academic networks got along fine for decades running on unencrypted NFS/NIS.

fsckboy2• 4 years ago

the internet's Eternal Black September

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

The black hats keep the developers releasing new versions, and the product and marketing teams keep a list of "features" and "improvements" to slip into every new version. Coincidentally most of the bugs and security vulnerabilities are caused by these new features and improvements. It's a vicious cycle.

Vrondi• 4 years ago

PSP7 was such a great app.

aendruk• 4 years ago

I dread the day Google contrives some trick to make Picasa do this. That and Paint Shop Pro 8 are still going strong on my parents’ new computers.

tracker14• 4 years ago

+1 on PSP after v7, especially after the Corel buyout of Jasc. It was hands down a favorite before, after it just got worse. Kind of wish I still had my v7 and serial number, though I could probably find it... I've been okay with Pinta and Paint.Net for most things I need such a software for. I still liked PSP better.

JakeAl• 4 years ago

imagine if the software decided by itself that it is too old to run or to replace itself with a new version against my wishes

Why I will never buy another Apple product. Had a great video editing station I would author DVDs with until one day Apple decided I needed to upgrade my OS to continue using the software which of course required a new computer. Apple's dead to me.

gofreddygo• 4 years ago

I am sensing a greater divide between people who demand more control over the technology they use and those willing to relinquish it.

Push for silent updates, force upgrades, always on tracking, remote bricking, notarization, (corporate cartels) trusted networks, making things harder to open, harder to repair, authorization for everything all point toward control.

I believe another generation of hackers will emerge from this transition.

glroyal• 4 years ago

In find it interesting that Wirth would accept needless complexity as jihad, and then put an object oriented programming language at the heart of his "back to basics" workstation Oberon.

Sweeping complexity under the rug isn't the same thing as removing it.

YesThatTom2• 4 years ago

I was at a startup from 2000-2003 where the chief scientist was a security wonk and demanded that our product worked with and without JavaScript enabled.

No wonder the startup failed. Imagine trying to make a useful product with one hand tied behind your back!

iso1631• 4 years ago

2000-2003 was a very different time, and people making javascript heavy sites then tended to be terrible. If I remember right gmail worked fine without javascript even after that time period.

With that attitude you likely were writing for IE5/6 only too. We're still dealing with the fallout from that 20 years later.

rrwo6• 4 years ago

I worked for a company that had one user complain about the site requiring JavaScript, because he didn't "trust" us. Manager asked him why he trusted us to create an account on the site.

Ensorceled4• 4 years ago

It can go the other way, the CEO at one company I worked at demanded that we have a rich, dynamic user experience with real time editing AND we fully support all the browsers that had visited the site in the last 6 months. We had people using Blackberry, IE6, Opera, Konqueror and stuff you've never heard of.

They were happy to force javascript but wanted it to work on early smart phones.

The VP product was losing her mind fighting the CEO over this.

naasking2• 4 years ago

Bizarre. It's like starting a parking lot business by trying to accommodate every vehicle you see driving by your site over 6 months. You could have Winnebagos, tractor trailers and more bizarre vehicles, none of which you should consider as viable customers.

alpaca128• 4 years ago

I just checked, Google and Amazon still work flawlessly without JS. And many other "useful products" too.

The question is, if a startup can't make a site that works without JS, are they actually focused on the product? Assuming it's not a webapp, of course.

Ensorceled4• 4 years ago

You're making two completely different versions of your web product: one with a rich, modern experience using JavaScript and the other using vanilla get/post.

I've built several SaaS products and I can't imagine building a complicated product that supports both a JS and no JS version with a small, startup team.

forgotmypw1717• 4 years ago

https://endtimes.dev/why-your-website-should-work-without-ja...

mrtksn4• 4 years ago

So the "movement" against modern browser features is not a movement and has nothing to do with these features but its simply a version of "kids these days lost their ways" thinking. A version of conservatism, I guess. "Everything was better in the good old days" and "The new generation is horrible, the humanity is doomed" kind of thoughts are probably a manifestation of fading youth.

StuckDuck• 4 years ago

This article is from 1999, what do you mean?

badsectoracula5• 4 years ago

It is also possible that stuff are getting worse though. After all i remember friends of mine who were in university raging on how bloated the web was around 2000 and i'm 99% certain they weren't middle-aged men disguised as teenagers :-P. If anything i don't remember knowing anyone above 25y back then who even cared about web stuff.

After all having some people see and complain about things getting worse doesn't mean that said things will stop getting worse if most people don't care or even noticing them getting worse to do something about it.

loloquwowndueo2• 4 years ago

We always complain about bloat and slowness, then we build faster machines and networks and bigger storage, and software and content promptly expand to fill it all up and make it feel sluggish again.

For a chuckle try running old software on a modern computer (fire up dos box and run WordPerfect or something) and be amazed at the speed of the thing. that is why we built a faster computer :)

mrtksn4• 4 years ago

When you look back, you can notice patterns: Something new and amazing comes out and it promises to take the humanity to a new age. At first it is fuelled by enthusiasm where believers work for free on it just to make it great and pay their bills by working for money on the old-school stuff. Their prime motivation is not profit.

Then this thing starts becoming profitable in the sense of bringing street cred and money and new kind of people rush in with their new ideas how to use this new thing. These new people don't share the same ideas with the original believers but they know how to build machinery around it to make it profitable and appeal for the masses. The new thing that was supposed to change the world becomes a concentrated and optimised version of the things before it.

The believers then become bitter purists and try to fight the new order by disowning the current technologies or methods and cater for the niche hipster elitist circles when the rest continues do their thing.

You can see it in everything, you can see it in printing press you can see it in Radio, you can see it in TV, you can see it in things that are not media: cars, clothing, shaving, coffee - everything.

Things don't become worse, they just become mainstream and that mass adoption is run not by purists but by people with no regard to the original ideals of the technology and masses love it this way and stays this way until its made obsolete by something else.

dkarl3• 4 years ago

I don't remember ever being excited about disruptive software updates. If anything, I'm more patient at sitting through an app update on a weak cell signal than I was when I was younger.

gspencley2• 4 years ago

I remember the days of waiting for the early adopters, reading the reviews and letting bug fixes and patches get released before making an informed decision to upgrade, if upgrading was considered worth it.

For things like security patches, pushing updates has been a net positive IMO.

For absolutely everything else, it's a disaster. I always used to think that the "free software purists" were a bit too radical for my tastes ... but now, in the era of SaaS, I find myself agreeing with them. I want to own and be in control of my hardware and software. Let me decide if upgrading is worth it.

rpdillon• 4 years ago

This strikes me as somewhat dismissive. My take is that the concerns raised in 1999 are even more true now. The problems we have with low-quality, bloated websites with questionable content are worse, and the rise of 'software that knows best' is only accelerating. If anything, this seems precient.

mrtksn4• 4 years ago

I completely agree with the criticism of bloat but IMHO that is a problem because the tooling to achieve the "modern software" is bad, not because of the requirements for modern software.

In other words, the criticism is fair but the solution of attempting to freeze time or even try to go back is not right. Sometimes though, when things get very bad going back to the basics and re-do everything can work.

gspencley2• 4 years ago

Also notable is this statement in the context of modern SaaS products:

"Who knows whether a new version will be available and usable when the current one stops working?"

With SaaS products the company can go out of business; they can change the product on you without your opt-in, making it unusable (or less usable) for your purposes and there is no way to downgrade to the previous version; they can stop supporting your web browser; your account can get disabled or compromised; new policies and regulations on data retention and privacy could render a particular SaaS product unusable for your purposes.

What are you meant to do if a SaaS tool you depend on suddenly stops working? How do you install the old version and get back to work?

hulitu3• 4 years ago

are probably a manifestation of fading youth.

When a program needs 3 build systems to build (ninja, meson, make) is probably a manifestation of exuberation.

mrtksn4• 4 years ago

I completely share these feelings but IMHO the products should't go back in time to ease the burden of the artisans. The tools should improve.

nine_k3• 4 years ago

No. It's not about anything old; it's about stripping things down to their essence.

A browser that can render text, and not much beside the text, emphasizes the text of a page, which, for many pages, is the content the user came for. Everything else is fluff.

In modern times, "Reader mode" in browsers does the same thing: removes fluff to make reading easier.

Of course it's great that now browsers support advanced features and enable amazing interactive pages like https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/, or just "simple" GMail. But such pages, and such highly interactive web applications, are fewer and further between than most pages that provide value by showing just static text and static images.

wruza2• 4 years ago

Young me (win95-2k era) had this feeling after researching into older software principles. I think that it is not [only] the effect of personal aging, but also piling up of a junk on top of an initial simple idea in any area. We just tend to notice that with years because everything straightforward-back-then becomes complicated, and straightforward-today flies under the radar.

But for browsers there is an obvious need for apps that are not “vb in an empty vba-enabled document”. This ugly heap is only stable because an enormous effort and skill goes into making it so.

seti0Cha• 4 years ago

Back in my day, when kids heard older people talking, they listened because they knew they were hearing from someone with more experience than themselves. Kids these days lost their ways and think that knowledge and judgement are achieved in youth and then gradually fade away.

Just kidding, back in my day kids assumed the same thing.

Also, this exact conversation has been happening since the web was created. Linked article is evidence of that.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 4 years ago

I agree with your commentary along the lines of o tempora o mores, when you could argue the pattern remains largely the same.

In a more practical way though, some new things are good, some new thing are bad. It makes sense to adopt good stuff and cut off the bad. Deck? Mostly good. Requiring phone number to play a game? Bad. Naturally, it is a very subjective process and we are bound to disagree on details.

Not that long ago a family member tried to use the same argument used here ( its a generational thing; old people just hate new stuff ) when trying to convince that Venmo is actually good as I was trying to gently indicate that maybe a payment system that by default announces to the world[1] I just spent X on Y may not be the best thing since sliced bread. Working near that space I was amused, but each to their own ( and I certainly am not going to tell the guy how to raise his kids ).

[1]https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/venmo-explains-why-transac...

poorlyknit• 4 years ago

This is exact conversation (modulo the web) has likely been happening since humans became a thing. It's an endless cycle and it takes a lot of self-reflection to step out of.

323• 4 years ago

20 years from now there will be HN posts like "In my good old days we wrote efficient Electron apps that only used 2 GB of RAM to display a todo list, today's developers are lazy, there is no need to ask the AI to synthesize such a simple app, and certainly it shouldn't need a QPU (QuantumProcessorUnit) to run".

aliqot• 4 years ago

One can only hope we'll still have mrtksn to set them straight.

deanCommie• 4 years ago

There is another more simpler layer to this:

Most people on HackerNews remember when they were the target demographic for most software. And they no longer are.

If you're under 40, this is how we all started. The target demographic since the explosion of the internet is no longer software engineers. That feels bad for people, and they lash out conservatively.

Because they're not wrong - the software IS worse. For them (us).

int_19h4• 4 years ago

I could agree to it, if only I didn't know so many non-tech people who also think that tech started to go downhill at some point - and specifically complain about some of the same things, such as forced updates and dumbed-down UX that actually makes their life harder.

rvieira• 4 years ago

Side note, the links took me to the Delorie page and DJGPP. That was a blast from the past.

raverbashing2• 4 years ago

True, and the page still works (and looks the same)

Looks like his most recent work is with RH https://developers.redhat.com/author/dj-delorie

protomikron• 4 years ago

On-topic: It's true, basic design often correlates with better content.

Off-topic: The author is one of the orignal authors of Gforth, one of the main Forth implementations.

frou_dh• 4 years ago

How do you know that someone chooses to disable JavaScript in their browser?

Answer: Don't worry, they'll tell you about it.

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

They probably use Arch Linux

AndrewVos• 4 years ago

Uhh rude. I use arch btw

forgotmypw1717• 4 years ago

How do you know someone has cognitive impairment which makes it difficult to use JS-heavy sites and/or is using an older device which has performance issues with heavy sites?

Answer: Don't worry, they just won't be able to use your site.

rdez6173• 4 years ago

The same could be said about the use of images on a site.

The solution is to develop sites with accessibility in mind. Use a screen reader; experience what ALL your users will experience. Experiment with various rendering tools to emulate color blindness.

There are even more tools to performance tune your website.

This all comes down to the site author taking the time to cater to as many users as possible. It is not inherently a problem with the use of JavaScript, or dynamic elements.

So, yeah, there are a lot of shitty websites out there. Folks that choose to deliberately cripple their browser are more likely to see these shortcomings.

queuebert2• 4 years ago

This is like all the anti-vegan humor. There must be a mental condition in which someone proselytizing is interpreted as a personal attack.

olalonde4• 4 years ago

A good reminder that techies are often completely out of touch with what the average Joe wants.

dkarl3• 4 years ago

And companies writing the software that average people use are motivated solely by "what the average Joe wants," where "what the average Joe wants" is defined by business metrics like "how much is Joe clicking" and "how much is Joe spending."

olalonde4• 4 years ago

I assume you don't believe this is a good thing? How would you measure "what the average Joe wants"?

zach_garwood• 4 years ago

Average Joes love clicking and spending. Gotta give the people what they want!

r90t• 4 years ago

Its a great experience to open HN website which is not overloaded w/ javascript. And even greater to go to another website which is even more lightweight. This feels like a good and friendly internet

controversial972• 4 years ago

Around 1996 or 1997, I saw netscape showing an small animated gif. Every cycle, the memory use of netscape went up by the size of the gif. On a machine with 4MB of RAM it did not take long to stop working.

pbhjpbhj• 4 years ago

Do you mean the throbber (image that animated to show when a page was loading)?

http://www.netscape-communications.com/netscapes-throbber-an...

controversial972• 4 years ago

It was an animated gif on a web page.

Tepix• 4 years ago

Still relevant today. Sites that break with adblockers are usually shit.

Why? Well probably because if the site developers themselves don't have adblockers, they are clueless.

nine_k3• 4 years ago

Sites that break with ad blockers are built to show ads. They only incidentally show any content, in order to lure users to see the ads. Users with ad blockers have negative value for such sites.

Sites that are built to show content but depend on ads to sustain the operation usually show a plea to support the site in a different way (by a donation or something) if they notice that ads are blocked. I find this more honest.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 4 years ago

That or banks. Certain major US bank I am using can't function with Origin on.

timbit42• 4 years ago

My bank website doesn't have third party ads anyway.

martyvis• 4 years ago

Anton didn't like PDF either :- https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-not-pdf.html

holri• 4 years ago

And he is correct that pages and fixed layout do not make sense for electronic media even if printed.

mhd3• 4 years ago

Yeah, getting the most use out of your paper (or picking said size in the first place) was a time-honored tradition of print typography. And sure, not 1:1 applicable to the screen.

I do think that the screen typography department has been seriously lacking here, though. Scrolling a single column can't really be the end of wisdom.

But the main problem we've got is that the ad people took care of on-screen typography once we progress far enough that screen sizes and resolutions actually would've made more things possible. Not the tradition of typography that made newspapers, books etc., but the flyer and full-page-ad demographic. PageMaker, not FrameMaker.

Browsers barely have the tools to make reading effective and enjoyable. CSS is oriented towards other purposes, and the browsers themselves only have the bare necessities – practically hidden "user stylesheets" or the one-size-fits-all "reader mode".

martin_a3• 4 years ago

Use [...] Postscript instead.

My Postscript is somewhat rusty but I think defining a fixed page size is THE first step in any postscript file. I don't think that's really better than PDF in that regard.

forgotmypw1717• 4 years ago

I still use this strategy, though these days, I primarily use Mosaic and Netscape for testing.

I tend to browse without JavaScript enabled, except for places I already trust to not abuse it. And if there is anything blocking me from accessing the page, such as a modal dialog, a cookie notice, a survey, a prompt to sign up for the newsletter, I close the tab.

Over time, I have found that type of rude lack of consideration for the reader's cognitive load and ability to correlate highly with low-quality content that is a waste of my time to read, so this practice also saves me a lot of reading time.

And every day, my Internet gets better and better.

I like the term "featurism", I'm going to try to remember it.

exitb• 4 years ago

Are there any version of Mosaic that are able to handle modern HTTPS?

josteink• 4 years ago

Probably if using a local HTTP proxy to relay the actual traffic?

II2II• 4 years ago

I don't know about Mosaic[1], but there are many alternatives out there. I frequently use elinks as a text only browser since it makes an attempt to layout pages (most pages have some form of layout to handle navigation elemnts these days). There are also browsers that handle graphics, but not scripting or CSS, if that is what you want.

[1] I have heard of people trying to get Mosaic to work on modern machines, but I think the efforts were restricted to rebuilding the software rather than adding features.

forgotmypw1717• 4 years ago

Still plenty of websites which run on HTTP. I know mine certainly do.

Security isn't everything, there's also accessibility to think about.

HTTPS breaks in many circumstances when it's not needed, including on current browsers.

You can also use a stripping proxy.

Bigger issues I've encountered with actually using Mosaic is that a) it does not support the Host header, so you must have a dedicated IP address, and b) it doesn't like semicolons in then Content-Type header, which most of today's servers include.

danjoredd6• 4 years ago

Honestly thinking on making a Mosaic clone. Without CSS or Javascript, I imagine it won't be terribly difficult to put together

classichasclass• 4 years ago

Bolt it on! Here's XMosaic 2.7b5 with TLS 1.3 on my own SPARC. (Disclosure: my project.)

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/07/crypto-ancienne-20-now-b...

narag• 4 years ago

I like the term "featurism", I'm going to try to remember it.

You're going to love the qualified version:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=creeping%20f...

tbran• 4 years ago

I feel like the strategy of closing sites with newsletter sign-ups, dialog, etc. is just going to waste your time. If I'm searching for something, I just want the information. Not gonna close websites till I find one that has no popups/modals!!

Popup Blocker [0] and uBlock Origin for Firefox will do a pretty good job of getting rid of the junk you don't want.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-blocker...

dwringer• 4 years ago

There are pros and cons to the approach. Information from such actively hostile sites tends to be of a lesser quality and of questionable reliability anyway IMHO.

forgotmypw1717• 4 years ago

It may seem that way, but I have found it to be very effective.

In my comment, I was thinking of the context of links I click to from HN.

But it also works when searching for information. When I close the tab of an unfriendly site, which, remember, likely has lower-quality information than an accessible one, I am immediately freeing myself to click the next link in the search results and get my information from an accessible site with higher-quality content.

Given the disparity of the quality of content, it is quite likely that I would have ended up at the latter site anyway.

checkyoursudo• 4 years ago

I just want the information

Certainly a reasonable choice on your part. We all want what we want.

I have a friend who, when he goes grocery shopping, grabs the first item he sees from each of the items on his list. As far as I can determine, this is without regard to price, quality, or any other factor.

Seirdy2• 4 years ago

I concur on using an adblocker to block modals, cookie notices, dickbars, related articles, author profile pictures, etc. In fact, I never dismiss modals because doing so may imply consent to tracking cookies (you never know these days…). I just block them with a quick cosmetic selector-based filter.

Unless it's a personal site/blog I typically open a site to find information I came for, and close it as soon as that task is done. Anything that makes this take longer than it needs to gets blocked. Sites should strive to stay open for as few seconds/minutes as possible while still giving me the requested information.

Regarding text/image-focused sites that require JS: I generally find sites made by people who haven't figured out how to send text over HTTPS to have low-quality content befitting of their low-quality stacks. I'm all the better for using my adblocker to block them from my search results page forever; it saves me time in the long run.

_notreallyme_• 4 years ago

Before closing the tab, I check if View -> Page Style -> No Style gives the text I was interested in reading. If i arrived on the page, chances are that there might be some information I'm looking for.

m463• 4 years ago

thanks, this is fascinating and useful

danjoredd6• 4 years ago

Not to mention people in the country suffer for featurism. In 2009 I had dial-up because broadband was unavailable where I was, and it took as long as 12 minutes to load some pages. I have since moved and no longer rely on dial-up, but I can only imagine how long it would take now with all the bloat happening. Honestly not sure how they do it these days.

layer82• 4 years ago

I like the term "featurism", I'm going to try to remember it.

They actually could have translated it 1:1 as “featuritis”. It basically means the same as “feature creep”.

forgotmypw1717• 4 years ago

I think they're two different, related words. Featuritis, the condition of software having too many features, is caused by featurism, the underconstrained and overemphasized pursuit of features.

vldr• 4 years ago

When I get obtrusive, unrequested maillist popups, I signup someone from my frequent spammer list. Makes me feel good :)

somecommit• 4 years ago

Need some max-width to whatever the average screen was back in 1999.

True story, I re-uploaded a website that I wrote in 1999, only now I discover that my header was never centered, if was just floating left. It's the only thing that look off, everything else is working perfectly. HMTL/CSS/JS is really a stable stack for the computer field.

SuperSandro20002• 4 years ago

The paper letter from the 19 hundreds is also still working perfectly, just a little bit dusty and yellowed.

exodust• 4 years ago

800 pixels was common screen width in 99. Even then it was not considered good practice design-wise to allow text to run the full width like it did in the mid 90s! No max-width, it had to be constrained with tables.

Yep agree it's a stable stack. I have a few archived sites I made in the 90s that work fine in today's browser, rollover JS buttons and all. My disdain for IE is visible in code. I was a Netscape guy for sure!

  if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE 3")== -1) {
    imageObjectSupported = true; // this line only executes in browsers that
    support  Javascript 1.1 except of course for IE3, which thinks it supports
    Javascript 1.1, but doesn't.
  }

mhd3• 4 years ago

I’m getting a lot of mileage out of this simple bookmarklet found here: https://maya.land/bookmarklets/readable/

Centered max-width without going all out reader mode.

casey2• 4 years ago

Imagine a world where it's common to cd into a directory and anywhere from 1-10 awk scripts start running and possibly your image viewer and media player. Would you think you had malware installed?

tomlin• 4 years ago

Today a website doesn’t even load without JavaScript. So, there’s that.

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

The Phoenix browser was the best I've ever used. From v0.1 to v0.5 it continually shrank in size, as improvements were just on speed, size, and the user experience. At v0.5 it was six-and-a-half megabytes. But by 0.6 it was getting bigger again. It already had enough of an HTML engine to render 95% of the web... but people just wanted more and more and more features, and refused to put them anywhere other than in the browser, defeating the point of the whole project.

jussij2• 4 years ago

For anyone who was actually around at that time you need to remember Windows was Windows 95 and that meant a badly behaved application generally required a reboot.

From what I remember of that time, Windows Explorer seemed a little faster, but most importantly it also seemed to require fewer reboots.

queuebert2• 4 years ago

That's not my memory of it. Windows 95 introduced the Task Manager, which obviated some of that. Maybe I was lucky in having well-behaved applications.

jussij2• 4 years ago

I was recalling my time writing Windows applications using C and Win16/Win32. That combination made it easy to write a badly behaved application; a stray C pointer here, an uninitialized handle there and before you know it, you've created a badly behaved Windows application. That then could easily result in a Windows to crash or lockup which then would require a reboot. Developing on a modern OS is so much easier only because the OS can protect itself from these badly written applications.

BaudouinVH• 4 years ago

Not Mosaic but worth browsing : the capsules in the Geminiverse ( https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ ) have no modern browser gimmick at all and a very good signal-to-noise ration. #my2cents

_greim_2• 4 years ago

It's interesting that the author would associate "frames, tables, and other fancy features" with a lack of interesting content. I assume tables are included because they were widely misused at the time, not because tabular data wasn't interesting.

I have a button in my toolbar called "dammit" which strips away every iframe, embed, object, audio, and video from the page, multiple times per second. These are considered foundational elements in the web platform and yet, when they disappear, pages seem to magically collapse into something readable.

ccvannorman• 4 years ago

Can you share how this works / code snippet? Would love to add this to my "Fk the modern internet" toolset. (I also use TamperMonkey which injects client js when url patterns are matched, to get rid of annoying cookie modals.)

_greim_2• 4 years ago

Posting bookmarklets on the web tends to be frowned on by forum admins, so here's the raw code.

    (function dammit() {
      setTimeout(dammit, 100);
      let els = document.querySelectorAll('object,embed,iframe,video');
      for (let el of els) {
        el.parentNode.removeChild(el);
      }
    })();

Feel free to make it into a bookmarklet using this guide:

https://gist.github.com/caseywatts/c0cec1f89ccdb8b469b1

incanus773• 4 years ago

Unrelated to this content (I think), tuwien.ac.at is a domain I have not seen nor thought of in decades. I see that there’s new stuff there too, but does anyone recall why this might have been a well-known domain in the 90s? I feel like I used to regularly read some content or download software from there, probably UNIX stuff.

romland• 4 years ago

I had the _exact_ same feeling; when I read your comment I started googling a bit but I came up short. In my case it should probably have been one or some of: MUDs, Linux, Debian, Amiga, shareware, usenet, IRC.

incanus773• 4 years ago

Yeah, same. Likely UNIX utilities, Linux software or howtos (Red Hat, Debian), maybe usenet. Maybe an FTP repository?

yesenadam• 4 years ago

I recognised it because I got into Forth in the last 5-10 years, and the author Anton Ertl was with Bernd Paysan the creator of GForth in the early 90s.

Otherwise, see here for his CV, interests, links which may trigger your memory

https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html

jagger27• 4 years ago

The source code of that page is beautiful.

xtracto• 4 years ago

Oh my, the mention of DJ Delorie brought me back memories: That's the famous DJGPP C/C++ compiler which along with Allegro library was the bomb to develop MSDOS games back in the day!

standardUser• 4 years ago

"If these browsers don't display anything, or the display looks shitty, there usually is not much content"

Crazy wild assumptions given that the web was brand-spanking-new and changing rapidly and unpredictably by the day. I'll never understand these needlessly-minimalist perspectives on interacting with the internet (yeah, I'm talking to you no-JavaScript folks). That approach only result in you missing out on things, and that was even more true in the 90's.

TheRealPomax• 4 years ago

It's easy to forget that 1999 was still firmly in the dial-up modem days. This was as much about practicality as it was about principles: every second spent loading a website would very literally cost you money, so any policy that would let you cut the process of finding worth-while content short, in an even remotely efficient manner, was a sensible thing to do.

Today, almost 25 years later, not even turning your phone or computer on will cost you just as much in ISP monthlies as it costs to load the heaviest, client-side-JS-generated, 4x resolution image websites nonstop all day every day.

We used to have a slightly better reason to prefer lean, content-first web pages than we do today.

anthk• 4 years ago

Back in the day mozplugger avoided lots of JS crapware.

cptskippy2• 4 years ago

those who have content generally value being readable

I find it ironic that his website looks like hot garbage on a modern ultrawide display.

I realize that it's over 20 years old and it still looks bad at 1280x1024 which was the resolution I was using back then as a poor college student with a second hand 19" Sony Trinitron that had a dodgy VGA cable you had to hold up just right with a coat hanger.

int_19h4• 4 years ago

I would argue that it's the job of the web browser to provide a default stylesheet such that a basic webpage with a header and a bunch of paragraphs looks "right". Which includes defining sensible viewport size.

cptskippy2• 4 years ago

That's a completely reasonable expectation and they never have to my knowledge.

So the author, having lived through the computing sea change of the 80s and 90s, who said "those who have content generally value being readable" should have anticipated higher resolution displays and took steps to ensure readability.

makach• 4 years ago

Insight! Good points still valid today. Although I wonder if the author has changed his opinion on browser.

djohnston• 4 years ago

Die Featuritis ist meist umgekehrt proportional zum Inhalt, und wer Inhalt hat, legt in der Regel Wert darauf, auch gelesen werden zu koennen. (Featurism is usually inverse proportional to content, and those who have content generally value being readable)

Too long for a tattoo but damn do I believe in this!

Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

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