4 ms·

This is everyday for me. Just whitelist the few sites that actually need it and most of the rest are fine. This should be the default. What do I care if some im

by mnm1 9y ago

This is everyday for me. Just whitelist the few sites that actually need it and most of the rest are fine. This should be the default. What do I care if some images don't load or CSS is slightly off? The main content is there. For sites that won't do anything without JS, I can consider whether I want to use them or not. Mostly not. Fuck other people running code unnecessarily, without my permission, on my computer. Especially Javascript. It was an extremely stupid and costly decision to have a scripting language like this run by default in browsers... though great for doing things against the user's wishes and making money off of it. And security holes. And privacy issues. Etc etc. The irony is that AJAX and SPAs were created as a response to the request/response model that was seen as too slow. Now it's these SPAs that are unbearably slow and buggy while the request/response model has only improved as hardware and networking have gotten better. I think if more people understood how the Internet works and what is actually happening, they would also turn off JS. No chance of that happening though.

ZeroClickOk 9y ago
I fully agree. Do you stop to think flash/action script was "obsolete" because all this? and now we have the exact same problems...
- slice_of_life 9y ago
  May very well be the case. All things flash are permanently disabled on my browser. If a site requires flash, I would much rather ignore the content altogether no matter how juicy it is.
- Touche 9y ago
  flash was obsoleted because 1) iphone didn't support it, 2) iphone didn't support it, 3) iphone didn't support it, and 4) JS replaced the non-DRM use cases (and now even replaced that).
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Well that and Flash was a massive vector of security problems. Plus it wasn't very good on mobile, even when it was supported (ie - on Android it was still bad and never got out of beta anyhow)
    - Touche 9y ago
      I thought it was fine on Android, I played many games on it that worked well even on those old underpowered phones. It was never good, but probably about 0% of flash apps were written that targeted mobile so I wouldn't have the expectation of good.
      - abritinthebay 9y ago
        I think "fine" is being generous. When it worked it was... not great, due to UI issues, but it at least worked. Trouble is it seemed to not consistently work. I worked at a flash game developer at the time (Zynga) and it would not always load our games even if it had done so previously - the difference was sometimes just refreshing a page.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- fineline 9y ago
  I did a lot of Flash/Flex work - it was the bees knees of front-end dev in the days before JQuery, Firebug, Chrome etc. and was the most consistent across platforms, as the same plugin was used on each, as opposed to trying to make your web-standards-based app work on several incompatible implementations. HTML/JS/CSS didn't come close at that time, but there was hope that it would develop to make Flash obsolete - which it now has. People always complained about how Flash "drained batteries" / "crashed browser" / "allows all this intrusive advertising". A case of blaming the technology for the way it was being used. People would say "I can't wait until Flash dies and we have the open web standards instead so we don't have these problems any more". So, fast forward a decade or so, Flash has been replaced by open web standards and ... guess what? We still have those problems...
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Because designers keep trying to turn static pages into "interactive" glossy booklet emulators, never mind "app"...
slice_of_life 9y ago
I find myself doing the same if I'm not on WiFi. I'll tether my samsung phone to my laptop, disable JS on chrome, whitelist what I like, jump into incognito to temporarily whitelist some page that requires JS; when done in incognito, the site isn't permanently whitelisted, it's just for that incognito session. I know! Laborious, but it must be done. I got into this habit because of the insane number of websites that have gotten into autoplay which essentially eats up all my mobile bundles. I love forbes for instance but it's essentially unreadable when on bundles.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Why i use Opera Mini even though the phone is quite capable of rendering the full page. Just wish there was a way to install Opera Mini on Windows tablets...
Touche 9y ago
> Fuck other people running code unnecessarily, without my permission, on my computer. You gave them permission. Actually, you asked them to do it when you sent that GET request to their servers that returned a bunch of HTML that included script tags.
- bphogan 9y ago
  Not really. They gave permission for the initial GET request for the HTML. The rest of the requests were inserted into the document by the programmer and executed by the browser. The browser assumed those links should be fetched automatically and executed. :)
  - Touche 9y ago
    The rest of the requests were triggered by the browser, not the programmer, because they were part of the initial HTML and the browser follows the HTML spec. The person complaining about it and is technical and knows this, they were under no misconception that they were viewing a document format that doesn't include code execution. Of which I'm having trouble of even thinking of an example, because even Word documents can execute code by default. If you dislike HTML, then don't use it. Use another format that serves your text-only needs. Gopher is a possibility, just don't click on any HTML files if you're using a web browser though.
    - 801699 9y ago
      Trivial to strip HTML tags and produce useful text. Send all the extraneous garbage you want to the user. She can remove it and keep only what she wants. Meanwhile from the user's perspective you are wasting bandwidth. Who is paying for that bandwidth?
    - bphogan 9y ago
      I was oversimplifying, hense the smiley. But since you want to argue... A request to an HTML document with no JavaScript src links, image links, or CSS links will not make multiple requests. I'm old enough to remember when I had to actively tell images to load. The code for the page is written by programmers. Programmers cause browsers to make multiple requests. Often times without understanding "the spec".

by mnm1 9y ago

ZeroClickOk 9y ago

I fully agree. Do you stop to think flash/action script was "obsolete" because all this? and now we have the exact same problems...

slice_of_life 9y ago
May very well be the case. All things flash are permanently disabled on my browser. If a site requires flash, I would much rather ignore the content altogether no matter how juicy it is.
Touche 9y ago
flash was obsoleted because 1) iphone didn't support it, 2) iphone didn't support it, 3) iphone didn't support it, and 4) JS replaced the non-DRM use cases (and now even replaced that).
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Well that and Flash was a massive vector of security problems. Plus it wasn't very good on mobile, even when it was supported (ie - on Android it was still bad and never got out of beta anyhow)
  - Touche 9y ago
    I thought it was fine on Android, I played many games on it that worked well even on those old underpowered phones. It was never good, but probably about 0% of flash apps were written that targeted mobile so I wouldn't have the expectation of good.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      I think "fine" is being generous. When it worked it was... not great, due to UI issues, but it at least worked. Trouble is it seemed to not consistently work. I worked at a flash game developer at the time (Zynga) and it would not always load our games even if it had done so previously - the difference was sometimes just refreshing a page.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
fineline 9y ago
I did a lot of Flash/Flex work - it was the bees knees of front-end dev in the days before JQuery, Firebug, Chrome etc. and was the most consistent across platforms, as the same plugin was used on each, as opposed to trying to make your web-standards-based app work on several incompatible implementations. HTML/JS/CSS didn't come close at that time, but there was hope that it would develop to make Flash obsolete - which it now has. People always complained about how Flash "drained batteries" / "crashed browser" / "allows all this intrusive advertising". A case of blaming the technology for the way it was being used. People would say "I can't wait until Flash dies and we have the open web standards instead so we don't have these problems any more". So, fast forward a decade or so, Flash has been replaced by open web standards and ... guess what? We still have those problems...
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Because designers keep trying to turn static pages into "interactive" glossy booklet emulators, never mind "app"...

slice_of_life 9y ago

I find myself doing the same if I'm not on WiFi. I'll tether my samsung phone to my laptop, disable JS on chrome, whitelist what I like, jump into incognito to temporarily whitelist some page that requires JS; when done in incognito, the site isn't permanently whitelisted, it's just for that incognito session. I know! Laborious, but it must be done. I got into this habit because of the insane number of websites that have gotten into autoplay which essentially eats up all my mobile bundles. I love forbes for instance but it's essentially unreadable when on bundles.

digi_owl 9y ago
Why i use Opera Mini even though the phone is quite capable of rendering the full page. Just wish there was a way to install Opera Mini on Windows tablets...

Touche 9y ago

> Fuck other people running code unnecessarily, without my permission, on my computer. You gave them permission. Actually, you asked them to do it when you sent that GET request to their servers that returned a bunch of HTML that included script tags.

bphogan 9y ago
Not really. They gave permission for the initial GET request for the HTML. The rest of the requests were inserted into the document by the programmer and executed by the browser. The browser assumed those links should be fetched automatically and executed. :)
- Touche 9y ago
  The rest of the requests were triggered by the browser, not the programmer, because they were part of the initial HTML and the browser follows the HTML spec. The person complaining about it and is technical and knows this, they were under no misconception that they were viewing a document format that doesn't include code execution. Of which I'm having trouble of even thinking of an example, because even Word documents can execute code by default. If you dislike HTML, then don't use it. Use another format that serves your text-only needs. Gopher is a possibility, just don't click on any HTML files if you're using a web browser though.
  - 801699 9y ago
    Trivial to strip HTML tags and produce useful text. Send all the extraneous garbage you want to the user. She can remove it and keep only what she wants. Meanwhile from the user's perspective you are wasting bandwidth. Who is paying for that bandwidth?
  - bphogan 9y ago
    I was oversimplifying, hense the smiley. But since you want to argue... A request to an HTML document with no JavaScript src links, image links, or CSS links will not make multiple requests. I'm old enough to remember when I had to actively tell images to load. The code for the page is written by programmers. Programmers cause browsers to make multiple requests. Often times without understanding "the spec".