5 ms·

> with one big difference: it loaded instantaneously and was fast When things were HTML, like most things "back in the days", thing were fast. Frames, maybe if

by pmlnr 10y ago

> with one big difference: it loaded instantaneously and was fast When things were HTML, like most things "back in the days", thing were fast. Frames, maybe iframes, and ready-to-consume HTML. Does Squirrelmail rings a bell? It was one of the earliest popular webmails in PHP, and it run every machines I accessed internet with, including 96MB RAM Pentium I MMX laptop. The current trend of outsourcing rendering to the client is not really a gain for anyone: the server side still does a lot of arranging and magic on that data which is served, while it could just generate HTML. Serve the already done HTML, replace the parts in the DOM like we did in the beginning of the AJAX days, and things would be much faster. Out of curiosity, I installed a lesser known browser, Dillo. It's dumb: it can parse a minimal amount of CSS and probably HTML ~4; the rest, it drops. And voilá: the internet - well, the ones that are still serving a viable miminum HTML without JS - became instant. Using the word "fast" would be an understatement. We need to go back to the roots, otherwise we're using a lot of CPUs as heaters.

CaptSpify 10y ago
> And voilá: the internet - well, the ones that are still serving a viable miminum HTML without JS - became instant. I've been using umatrix for this effect. I have some sites that unfortunately I need to use JS on. Sure, some sites fail to the point of not even working, but overall, I find sites faster, more user friendly, and more responsive than pre-umatrix.
Elrac 10y ago
I used to host SquirrelMail on my little $10/month personal server. My users (OK, friends and relatives) were quite happy with it! There's a lot broken with the recent model of browsing, essentially, applications rather than content.
Kiro 10y ago
And I presume Google Maps works great in Dillo?
- pmlnr 10y ago
  No, it absolutely doesn't. However there were maps before Google Maps, not even bad ones. The greatness of Google Maps: a, satellite images; b, near-live traffic data; c, geotagged images. Oh, wait, the third is gone, and the second is not thanks to Google but to a startup they bought ;)
spaceribs 10y ago
I feel like this is a situation where developers are looking back to an internet that doesn't exist anymore. In 2002, there were 665 million internet users, now there are 3.4 billion and growing [http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/]. If we were still stuck with terrible standards implementations and lack of processing power, I would side with the "Lets do everything on the server again!" argument, but we're not. For most use cases only privileged information has the requirement of server processing, and if thats not a requirement, why not take advantage of the device requesting the service? Set aside the 5 second delay user experience annoyance, and realize that as a business there is no way to scale your services profitably without offloading as much work as possible to the web client.
- pmlnr 10y ago
  > In 2002, there were 665 million internet users, now there are 3.4 billion and growing A significant part of that 3.4 billion are on mobile, which is even deeper prone to the overused JS problem. > terrible standards implementations Ah, you mean IE6. In it's prime time, it was a brilliant browser, standards or not; it was a necessary evil to forcefully move things ahead. It has XHR, webfonts, a gazillion things none of the browsers had yet. It indeed stuck around for too long, but this was not the case in it's initial state. > lack of processing power https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastest-site-in-the-world-18a0e1cdf4a7#4509 https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastes... -> Read the paragraph "#2 Do mobile first. Like, really do it." We do lack processing power on mobile, so for that 2-3billion people, who are using mobile _only_ or mobile first, we need economical solutions. > why not take advantage of the device requesting the service? Because you can't assume the device is powerful enough to do so. Why do you think https://mbasic.facebook.com https://mbasic.facebook.com still exists? > Set aside the 5 second delay user experience annoyance You go against one of the initial hard rules of the web with that. I wonder if is the importance of speed had changed, but judging by the grouchy voices all around, it did not. People only keep using the services because they deliberately made it hard to leave or because they learned tactics from Microsoft and are constantly eliminating competitors. > and realize that as a business there is no way to scale your services profitably without offloading as much work as possible to the web client. Now, this is complete nonsense; there is no money you save there. How is generating all those React apps, shuffling all that data is better then generating HTML? :) Of course, there are exceptions, there are always exceptions, but most of the things would not need mammoth sized invisible JSONs to be parsed in the browser while the pre-rendered HTML could be served and manipulated only when needed.
dvfjsdhgfv 10y ago
The problem is that less and less websites support JS-less browsing, even though in many (if not most) cases it's completely unnecessary, i.e. what I need from the website (mostly: reading text) could be accomplished just by HTML and JS.
Yetanfou 10y ago
Dillo, yes. I did quite a bit of development for the previous, GTK-based version. I added tabs, frames, a simple command language and several other features which I distributed as a patch set due to the fact that the core developers were somewhat antagonistic against external developers [1]. I kept up with this for more than a year but finally gave up when the Dillo project went dormant due to a failed fund drive. Eventually the project got going again around a new code base built on FLTK. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ADillo#Frames.2C_Tabs.2C_SSL.2C_I18N_and_others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ADillo#Frames.2C_Tabs.2C...

by pmlnr 10y ago

CaptSpify 10y ago

> And voilá: the internet - well, the ones that are still serving a viable miminum HTML without JS - became instant. I've been using umatrix for this effect. I have some sites that unfortunately I need to use JS on. Sure, some sites fail to the point of not even working, but overall, I find sites faster, more user friendly, and more responsive than pre-umatrix.

Elrac 10y ago

I used to host SquirrelMail on my little $10/month personal server. My users (OK, friends and relatives) were quite happy with it! There's a lot broken with the recent model of browsing, essentially, applications rather than content.

Kiro 10y ago

And I presume Google Maps works great in Dillo?

pmlnr 10y ago
No, it absolutely doesn't. However there were maps before Google Maps, not even bad ones. The greatness of Google Maps: a, satellite images; b, near-live traffic data; c, geotagged images. Oh, wait, the third is gone, and the second is not thanks to Google but to a startup they bought ;)

spaceribs 10y ago

I feel like this is a situation where developers are looking back to an internet that doesn't exist anymore. In 2002, there were 665 million internet users, now there are 3.4 billion and growing [http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/]. If we were still stuck with terrible standards implementations and lack of processing power, I would side with the "Lets do everything on the server again!" argument, but we're not. For most use cases only privileged information has the requirement of server processing, and if thats not a requirement, why not take advantage of the device requesting the service? Set aside the 5 second delay user experience annoyance, and realize that as a business there is no way to scale your services profitably without offloading as much work as possible to the web client.

pmlnr 10y ago
> In 2002, there were 665 million internet users, now there are 3.4 billion and growing A significant part of that 3.4 billion are on mobile, which is even deeper prone to the overused JS problem. > terrible standards implementations Ah, you mean IE6. In it's prime time, it was a brilliant browser, standards or not; it was a necessary evil to forcefully move things ahead. It has XHR, webfonts, a gazillion things none of the browsers had yet. It indeed stuck around for too long, but this was not the case in it's initial state. > lack of processing power https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastest-site-in-the-world-18a0e1cdf4a7#4509 https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastes... -> Read the paragraph "#2 Do mobile first. Like, really do it." We do lack processing power on mobile, so for that 2-3billion people, who are using mobile _only_ or mobile first, we need economical solutions. > why not take advantage of the device requesting the service? Because you can't assume the device is powerful enough to do so. Why do you think https://mbasic.facebook.com https://mbasic.facebook.com still exists? > Set aside the 5 second delay user experience annoyance You go against one of the initial hard rules of the web with that. I wonder if is the importance of speed had changed, but judging by the grouchy voices all around, it did not. People only keep using the services because they deliberately made it hard to leave or because they learned tactics from Microsoft and are constantly eliminating competitors. > and realize that as a business there is no way to scale your services profitably without offloading as much work as possible to the web client. Now, this is complete nonsense; there is no money you save there. How is generating all those React apps, shuffling all that data is better then generating HTML? :) Of course, there are exceptions, there are always exceptions, but most of the things would not need mammoth sized invisible JSONs to be parsed in the browser while the pre-rendered HTML could be served and manipulated only when needed.

dvfjsdhgfv 10y ago

The problem is that less and less websites support JS-less browsing, even though in many (if not most) cases it's completely unnecessary, i.e. what I need from the website (mostly: reading text) could be accomplished just by HTML and JS.

Yetanfou 10y ago

Dillo, yes. I did quite a bit of development for the previous, GTK-based version. I added tabs, frames, a simple command language and several other features which I distributed as a patch set due to the fact that the core developers were somewhat antagonistic against external developers [1]. I kept up with this for more than a year but finally gave up when the Dillo project went dormant due to a failed fund drive. Eventually the project got going again around a new code base built on FLTK. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ADillo#Frames.2C_Tabs.2C_SSL.2C_I18N_and_others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ADillo#Frames.2C_Tabs.2C...