Why browse the Web in Emacs? (2008)

http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/08/why-browse-the-web-in-emacs/

by pmoriarty • 12 years ago

152 85 12 years ago

sachachua.com

pakled_engineer• 12 years ago

No eww.el mention? It comes w/24.4

Sir_Cmpwn• 12 years ago

This article was written in 2008.`

stevebmark• 12 years ago

Is terrible, this idea.

solistice• 12 years ago

Can you elaborate please?

joaorj• 12 years ago

Quick answer: because you are a masochist

dschiptsov• 12 years ago

   M-x eww http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index_tx.htm

phaer• 12 years ago

The example is well chosen because the Common Lisp Hyperspec is actually nicer to view in a text browser than in a graphical one ;)

jarcane• 12 years ago

It is a dream of mine to do exactly this, but even eww.el just wasn't any good to actually use. I can do everything else in Emacs, except that, but that's a pretty big something.

seccess• 12 years ago

This covers many of the reasons I prefer web browsing without JS enabled: speed, less mem usage, safer. Before I started doing so, I thought that disabling JS would make the internet unusable, but a vast majority of pages display their content just fine without it. In addition, it is really easy to add domains to the JS whitelist in Chrome without the need to go into the options menu every time (less so in FF). AND, Chrome uses separate whitelists for normal and private browsing, and will clear the private browsing whitelist when you close the window! There are some periodic annoyances, but I wouldn't think of going back to default-enabled.

Browsing the web in Emacs is a bit too hardcore for me though :P

insertnickname3• 12 years ago

More and more websites now reimplement loading the page in JavaScript. Just thinking about it makes me angry.

gnuvince2• 12 years ago

I really dislike how a lot of multi-page navigation (i.e. getting results 51-100) is now commonly done with AJAX. It's not really faster than loading a new page, but it breaks the back button. "Oh you clicked on the 287th link and hit back? Here are results 1-50." So annoying.

timothya2• 12 years ago

Why does that make you angry? Sometimes, reimplementing how loading works can make your website more performant, for example. If JavaScript gives developers the power to make their websites better, why shouldn't they take advantage of that power?

digisign• 12 years ago

Noscript and ghostery (for the less hardcore) do similar for Firefox. Don't browse without them! It's like a condom for the internet.

I cringe every time I load up a browser on the iPad and wonder what information sites are gathering.

JetSpiegel2• 12 years ago

HTTPSwitchboard for Chrome-like, and Policeman for Firefox. Those 2 extensions replace NoScript, RequestPolicy, AdBlock, you name it.

mitchtbaum• 12 years ago

HTTPSwitchboard is so awesome for this. https://github.com/gorhill/httpswitchboard

P.S. Next version might be a local proxy (well, usually local) which will improve browser performance, cross-compatibility with other browsers and across OSes, and all around fit better, imho (which is that a browser's only job is to render web content).

chestnut-tree• 12 years ago

"I thought that disabling JS would make the internet unusable, but a vast majority of pages display their content just fine without it"

I also browse the web with Javascript disabled (using Noscript), but have formed the opposite impression: more and more sites won't display their content (or display their content incorrectly) if Javascript is disabled. Most of the sites I'm looking at are not "web apps" or SPAs (single page apps), they are sites with text articles or links so they have no real reason to break without Javascript. (It's always annoying when you attempt to click a link only to find it won't work unless Javascript is enabled.)

The rise of Javascript frameworks is only fuelling this trend of Javascript-dependent web sites. I've said this before, but Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.

chriswarbo3• 12 years ago

It's always annoying when you attempt to click a link only to find it won't work unless Javascript is enabled.

Ah, the number of times I've asked colleagues to stop doing this! If you want a JS-powered link/button/whatever on a page, insert it using JS; then you're guaranteed that it will only show up for those who can use it.

Likewise, all togglable content should begin visible, and selectively-hidden by JS during page load; that way, it only gets hidden for those users capable of showing it again.

Also, although this is rarer, all work should be done in small, isolated event handlers. That way, when some unexpected situation arises (eg. the user is blocking your chosen spyware platform), that particular handler dies, but all of the rest keep working (eg. the button handlers, the slideshows, etc.).

userbinator• 12 years ago

It probably depends on the exact type of sites you normally visit; I default to JS off but the majority of sites I visit are "pre-Web 2.0" informational types which are perfectly readable without JS. As you notice, it's mostly the newer sites which are problematic.

Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.

...which I think is both selfish and somewhat ironic since web developers are almost certainly users too.

bdg• 12 years ago

Does anyone remember Gopher:// ?

My experience was that content was a first-class-citizen of the gopher-net, because we didn't have "hyper media".

jayvanguard• 12 years ago

Damn kids and their "hyper" media. Why couldn't they all just be satisfied with good old fashioned calm media.

davidw• 12 years ago

In the text-based browser I used back then, Gopher appeared nice and neat, with easy to read lists, whereas whatever web browser presented stuff in a sort of jumbled way. Gopher seemed like the better system and I wasn't really impressed with the www stuff I'd load.

kissickas• 12 years ago

Wow, I had never heard of it, but that looks pretty cool. Gopherpedia is a complete interface to Wikipedia which I'll probably make use of.

Anyone else running Lynx? I don't use it for normal browsing (FF+NoScript like many others here) but I do fire it up for some of the purposes listed in the original article - works well with my workflow, no distractions, and of course it's really safe. Incidentally, it still fully supports Gopher.

On Mac OS, I highly recommend Lynxlet http://habilis.net/lynxlet/

aruggirello• 12 years ago

I used Lynx back in my glorious startup days (12-15 years ago :) it was a great tool to see what the various crawlers (which were Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo and Hotbot at the time) were actually "seeing" on the pages of my site. It helped solving issues with spacing, alt texts...

brownbat• 12 years ago

I'm a big fan of Lynx. (Haven't changed my profile in a while.) Though it is sad that it breaks on most of the modern web.

I've often wished someone would by the .text TLD and have strict bans on images and restrictions on scripts.

It'd probably just quickly and abysmally fail, but hey, 140 character limits caught on, who knows.

pauljburke• 12 years ago

I was working at a university in the UK and got to see Mosaic in 93(I think, it was a very early beta). I said to the main sysadmin "It's very pretty, but it will never replace gopher". He still reminds me of that fact occasionally. Even then it wasn't as fast or efficient to get data/documents out of and I stand by that judgement.

hacknat• 12 years ago

All she had to talk about was scripting. It is super convenient to be coding in your language, have another window that is open beside your code that automatically does your searches on a certain website based on what you have open in the other window.

sachac• 12 years ago

This is true! I've used keyboard macros with webpages and textareas to save myself lots of time. =)

jfb2• 12 years ago

I think what would be interesting is not in bringing the web to Emacs but rather Emacs to the web; a web browser that exposed everything right down to the rendering primitives in a decent (well, better than elisp or Javascript) language, allowing users to customize how they interact with the web in the way that Emacs users customize how they interact with text.

swombat• 12 years ago

Firefox is already pretty heavily customisable through XUL and, of course, is open source so you can modify every aspect of it...

jfb2• 12 years ago

I guess XUL is the stumbling block for me there. And of course, the browser itself can be modified, for which yay! but really I'm looking for a small set of primitives exposed in a high-level language that can be combined to create web browsers specific to certain tasks; perhaps something like this could be retrofitted onto Firefox, in the way that Emacs was an macro-extension of an existing editor.

sedachv• 12 years ago

http://common-lisp.net/project/closure/

3rd34• 12 years ago

Just yesterday, I tried it the other way around with a terminal emulator in the browser using FireSSH [1]. However, I’m not sure whether it is particularily safe to have a SSH connection to localhost in Firefox. It also needs some key-rebinding to be of any use which I haven’t done yet.

[1] http://firessh.net/

3rd34• 12 years ago

Yeah right, I have no idea why I deserve a downvote.

3rd34• 12 years ago

LOL, are you fucking kidding me…

One of the points of the blog post is that web browsing in Emacs allows you to integrate browser work and Emacs work, which for me is the most compelling one. But you can possibly achieve something similar by integrating Emacs into Firefox via SSH and using for example .js [1] for automatization work. That way you wouldn’t have the disadvantage that you basically lose most formatting and layout which are actually quite helpful if you stay away from the loud and annoying websites. That’s why I thought it was worth mentioning. I also use Tree Style Tabs and it could be helpful to keep work related websites and Emacs buffers organized in that way.

[1] https://github.com/defunkt/dotjs

boyaka• 12 years ago

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...

Also crosh on my chromebook, which uses the same url just replaces nassh with crosh.

krylon• 12 years ago

I use w3m from Emacs all the time. It is not my primary browser, but I do like it for reading documentation while hacking. It is ridiculously fast and uses very little memory when compared to Firefox.

It is very convenient for copying snippets of code and pasting them in whatever file you are editing (or a REPL), too.

The same, to a lesser degree, goes for Dillo. It is amazing how Dillo can have dozens of tabs open and never use more thant 50-100 MB of RAM... :)

omaranto• 12 years ago

Have you tried eww in Emacs 24.4? I already like it better than w3m.

username223• 12 years ago

It's better once you keep it from messing with your text background color. I think this does it:

    (defadvice shr-color-check (before unfuck compile activate)
      "Don't let stupid shr change background colors."
      (setq bg (face-background 'default)))

chriswarbo3• 12 years ago

I agree. Not had chance to try eww yet.

One step up from Dillo is Netsurf, which seems to handle more CSS than Dillo but is still pretty snappy.

ams6110• 12 years ago

I use emacs to read my email and use w3m to format HTML emails (which sadly, most are these days, and more and more don't include a plain text alternant). In particular it does a good job with tables. I have not tried eww yet.

platz• 12 years ago

elinks is quite useful on a raspberry pi

PaulHoule2• 12 years ago

I don't know if Emacs is so secure. Years ago I wrote a virus that would propagate between files in Emacs lisp.

baddox2• 12 years ago

Could it propagate from computer A with an infected Emacs to computer B with a clean Emacs, simply by opening a file saved by A on B? If so, I would be pretty surprised and impressed. If not, I don't think I would consider it a virus.

hug• 12 years ago

If it can propagate from machine to machine it would be considered a worm.

If it only infects files locally, it's a virus.

technomancy2• 12 years ago

Years ago, huh? Was it before Emacs added support for whitelisting file-local variables? These days you can't just place elisp in arbitrary files and have it get executed.

(Of course, propagating to other elisp files is both easy and completely orthogonal to Emacs, since you could do it in basically any language.)

PaulHoule2• 12 years ago

The same problem happened with Microsoft Word, which, in my mind, is a product a lot like Emacs. Emacs is written in a special dialect of LISP, Word is written in a special dialect of Visual Basic. Both have a mind-boggling array of features, etc.

The difference was the Word viruses got a lot more fame because more people used Word.

oconnor663• 12 years ago

You’re safe from browser exploits.

I'm skeptical of that. Of course no one is actually targetting whatever vulnerabilities there are, and getting rid of JS helps a lot. But is all the code sandboxed or anything?

hrjet• 12 years ago

Did you mean the browser code itself? We are actually trying to do that in gngr[1].

(1) https://gngr.info

technomancy2• 12 years ago

Given that eww (the latest Emacs web browser) is written in elisp, it's safe from buffer overflows and such, which are the most common form of vulnerability in software written in C. The actual parsing code uses libxml, which isn't elisp, but is one of the most widely-deployed parsers around.

Obviously there's no such thing as perfect security, but I would guess it's way more difficult to exploit than your conventional browsers.

Tehnix• 12 years ago

From the other comments, I feel more alone in this camp than I thought. I've taken the stance to not even consider a user, browsing sites I develop, with javascript off. It's such an integral part of the web by now, and without it, interactivity doesn't really exist.

Is it really so prevalent to browse without JS (I doubt the casual user would do that, since they're probably not even aware that JS exists)?

The only reason I'd care about displaying content without JS, is specifically for crawlers.

njr123• 12 years ago

Its not prevalent at all. The HN echo chamber makes it seem like there are many people who do this, but the number of people in the real world is basically zero.

3rd34• 12 years ago

Off-topic: What does the [noobtor] mark on the dead comment below mean?

alxndr• 12 years ago

Guess: a new ("noob") account registered/used via Tor?

wtbob2• 12 years ago

I browse with JavaScript turned off by default, and have ever since I saw a pretty cool DEFCON (I think) presentation on the number of gaping holes it makes possible. I'll sometimes enable it for a site, but I'll also sometimes just not use a site.

I really don't like the fact that this is getting more and more difficult to do. The Web is not about allowing random people to execute code on my computer; it's about reading documents and sharing information.

AlisdairO2• 12 years ago

disclaimer: not a web dev, don't really have a dog in this race.

The reaction here strikes me quite a bit - talk about supporting an old web browser which has a small market share, and the reaction will often be that it's a waste of time. No-js users are a miniscule fraction of a typical site's audience, so why would those sites bother to support them any more than they would bother to support an old browser?

rakoo• 12 years ago

I believe there's a difference between not supporting an old, non-standard-compliant browser, where you must have the same functionalities but the platform is different, and not supporting users who have turned off javascript, because in this case the functionalities themselves are different. You almost have 2 different "products" in this case.

Also, angry users are always the most vocal. The huge majority that doesn't bother (or doesn't even know how to) turning off javascript will not complain on HN.

rprospero• 12 years ago

...without it, interactivity doesn't really exist.

This is what it comes down to for me. I started browsing with Javascript off after both my cores were pegged at 100% for forty-five seconds to load a page with a 500 word movie review. The pages wasn't nearly as interactive without the Javascript, but I didn't care. I didn't want to interact. I just wanted to read the text.

If your site is an actual app that I'm going to interact with, I'll turn on Javascript. That makes sense. However, if it's something that I'm just going to read, then Javascript stays off.

progman• 12 years ago

The problem with JS is not interactivity but a lot of aggressively annoying advertisement and data grabbing which usually comes along JS.

My solution is to use different browsers. My default browser has JS turned off. If I encounter a possibly interesting site which requires JS then I use another browser for that. This solution keeps my default browser clean without need to configure any JS blocker.

diziet• 12 years ago

A great reason not to do this, if you are building anything that will ever be touched by end users (or are building anything that is an application on the web browser) is this isolates you from how real users consume internet content.

netcan• 12 years ago

Customizing something and making it yours is a powerful thing. I think that ultimately that's the reason. One reason is that you make things uniquely fit you. But, I think in more cases than we are aware or want to admit, the emotional reasons are the real reasons. Sometimes its nice to have something you made, not something that was mass produced for everyone.

"Resource hogging" always seems like such a crazy reasoning. It's more aesthetic than practicalities. Is your memory really so scarce?

to3m• 12 years ago

There's a line between "use" and "hogging"...

My computer is noticeably slower when Firefox is running. Quite often, Firefox will grab the audio device and not give it back, silencing all other programs. Sometimes the fan will just spin up and the computer will sound like a hoover until I quit it. Over time it just uses up more and more memory, rarely giving it back. It's not unusual to look at the task list and see Firefox taking up 400+MBytes, even though you're doing very little. (Right now, it's taking up 420MBytes. All I have open is the HN page with this text box I'm typing in.) I also think it does something rude with the GPU, too - when I'm not running Firefox, the auto-hide dock pops up perfectly smoothly. When Firefox is running, though, it stutters as it pops up.

The X11 version is terrible to use over a network too.

(I had a whole different set of complaints about Safari.)

clarry4• 12 years ago

Firefox is the only application that regularly crashes (due to running out of memory) on my system. I could increase memory limits and it'll end up causing so much swapping I wish it had just crashed.

Why browse the Web in Emacs? (2008)

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