18 ms·

Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

284 points by artogahr 4y ago

NotYourLawyer 4y 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.
- rrwo 4y 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.
  - badsectoracula 4y 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 4y 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.
    - rrwo 4y ago
      Not every site uses "node junk" or even jQuery.
      - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
        That’s why parent said “the average site” and not “every site”.
    - Kiro 4y ago
      That has nothing to do with Node.
    - sumtechguy 4y ago
      Javascript is so good we hide it with transpilers so we do not have to use it.
  - lucideer 4y 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.
    - rrwo 4y ago
      Just because Twitter does that doesn't mean it is the case everywhere else. It moves some of the rendering work from the backend (having to query the data and generate markup) to the browser (query the API and generate the content based on the responses). At my current job, it's made a significant improvement. The server returns compact JSON data instead of HTML, so it's easier to generate the data and uses less bandwidth. It also looks faster for the user, because they change search parameters and only part of the page changes, rather than reloading the entire page. As for "easier to maintain", that may be subjective. Code to generate a simple HTML template from results is replaced by JavaScript code to hit the API and generate the DOM. Although HTML5 templates makes that much easier.
      - lucideer 4y ago
        I'm not saying it's impossible - glad to hear you've successfully implemented it in your workplace. I'm just saying that by-and-large it has the opposite effect to the stated intent. If most examples of a strategy make things worse, and only one person uses that strategy to improve things, then going around saying "everyone is doing it wrong" rather than questioning the strategy isn't particularly sound. I've build plenty of (small) client-side rendered UIs myself that lazy-load content; I know the trade-offs and I even believe I can achieve a performant outcome on my own. But that's anecdotal. In the wild, I have not seen a single major website improve perf. via lazy-fetched content rendering.
  - weberer 4y 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.
    - Altho 4y ago
      It's a tradeoff, basically the question is "Will most users need and read all the content or not". Displaying everything at once without making extra querries is best, but not always possible . The frontend is fetching the backend. So it's going to say "Hey, send me all the comments from all the posts from november 2021". If there are 3 it's fine, but if there are like 23,000 of them you can't really load everything at once , that's why we use pagination on the backend. We say "Hey send me results 1 to 25 of the comments from all the posts from November 2021" This way the frontend only displays 25 comments for a quick page load and we hope that it will be enough. To display the other comments either we ask the backend to let us know how many pages of 25 elements there are and we display that amount of pagination element links (pagination), or we simply tell the frontend to ask the next page once we reach the bottom (infinite scroll). Even if displaying all the content is possible, if there are content that only 1% of your users will read you might want to offer faster loading for 99% of users and add a few seconds of loading for the 1%.
      - raverbashing 4y ago
        > "Will most users need and read all the content or not" For the main content, yes, yes, most will. Why are they on the website in the first place? Especially the main content. Sure, some things you can load later, like comments, etc
      - simion314 4y ago
        >This way the frontend only displays 25 comments for a quick page load Many years ago smart frameworks implemented smart stuff like you can display only what is visible. For example you could have a table with 1 million rows but in your html page you will not create 1 million row elements, you can create GUI widgets only for the visible part, as the user scrolls you can recycle existing widgets. As a practical example , you go to a yotube channel page and they load only 2 or 3 rows of videos and you have to scroll to force more to appear, this means you can't do a Ctrl+F and seatrch and is also less efficient because as you scroll the items at the top are not recycled and reuse so probably more memory is used. The json for all the videos is not huge,some strings with title and thumbnails, maybe some numbers but the issue is that is not possible to natively do the best/correct thing, only recently we got lazy loading for example so basicaly html was desibned for documents and frameworks/toolkits designed for apps did the correct thing many years ago... this is an explanation but no excuse why things are such a shit show with pagination today.
  - tannhaeuser 4y 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 4y ago
  Yeah, who needs google maps anyway? Just use the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    Yeah, well. There are a few things that are worth whitelisting.
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapscii https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapscii
  - forgotmypw17 4y 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.
    - danielbln 4y ago
      > it no longer displays zip codes Strange, it does for me, everywhere where it shows an address.
    - Qub3d 4y ago
      DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps, which has quietly become a solid alternative the past few years. (https://xkcd.com/2617/ https://xkcd.com/2617/)
      - forgotmypw17 4y ago
- Altho 4y 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 4y ago
    Webapps vs websites. Should be no need for any website to require JavaScript to function.
- tannhaeuser 4y 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.
- SuperSandro2000 4y ago
  I think it's worth my time to not need to go to the post box every day and exchange dead trees.
  - danjoredd 4y ago
    What does physical mail have to do with anything? You can get email without Javascript in your browser
- jmclnx 4y 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 :)
- ecmascript 4y 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.
  - danjoredd 4y 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.
    - ecmascript 4y ago
      I'm not upset, I am just curious and think the guy had quite the ignorant take on the whole subject matter. I kind of disagree though, most websites do need javascript even if they simply contain only an article. Extremely few devs will care about the astonishing minority that disables javascript by default and saying that the websites that do this is trash, like so many people that favor this kind of thinking does, is being ignorant. The javascript hate is strange because it's like people would hate programs written in python for no other reason than the program being written in python. I think it comes down to devs not being able to chose and that the only real choice is already made for them so then they end up hating it. But even alternatives like Phoenix Liveview / Hotwire that minimizes the usage of javascript requires javascript to work properly. In time I believe most websites will ship a wasm binary and then this debate will be over forever and javascript will become irrelevant. But what do I know? :)
smilespray 4y ago
tannhaeuser 4y ago
> 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).
- badsectoracula 4y 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 4y ago
    It might be talking about pages that used tables for styling/layout
jansan 4y ago
- technion 4y ago
  There is a current front page article on the same blog, I suspect someone browsed from that and shared what they found.
  - artogahr 4y ago
    I indeed did! I thought people here would find it interesting.
- b112 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20000824172326/geraldholmes.freeyellow.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000824172326/geraldholmes.free...
derane 4y ago
wie kommt das hier hoch ? 16 Points ?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- martin_a 4y ago
  Please speak English, fellow German, it's more polite.
rrwo 4y ago
This aged well.
tiborsaas 4y ago
Also known as ideology driven browsing.
dave84 4y 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.
- myfonj 4y 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.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-ancient-browsers.html http://web.archive.org/web/19970106091058/http://www.complan...
  - artogahr 4y 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).
badsectoracula 4y 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 https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf
- tannhaeuser 4y 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 4y ago
    Go to Firefox settings and disable auto-update? `about:config` > `app.update.auto: false`
YesThatTom2 4y 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 4y 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.
- rrwo 4y 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.
- Ensorceled 4y 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.
  - naasking 4y 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.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mrtksn 4y 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 4y ago
  This article is from 1999, what do you mean?
- badsectoracula 4y 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.
  - loloquwowndueo 4y 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 :)
    - Qub3d 4y ago
      We've made machines so much faster that a lot of old software is unusable because its too fast. One of my favorite examples: Lego Island's driving mechanic is tied to frame rate, so on a modern machine tapping left or right will fling your car 90+ degrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CmqbccCqI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CmqbccCqI0
rvieira 4y ago
Side note, the links took me to the Delorie page and DJGPP. That was a blast from the past.
- raverbashing 4y 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 https://developers.redhat.com/author/dj-delorie
protomikron 4y 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
frou_dh 4y ago
How do you know that someone chooses to disable JavaScript in their browser? Answer: Don't worry, they'll tell you about it.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  They probably use Arch Linux
  - AndrewVos 4y ago
    Uhh rude. I use arch btw
    - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
      But do you disable JavaScript?
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        No I rewrite the JavaScript in Rust
- forgotmypw17 4y 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 4y 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.
olalonde 4y ago
A good reminder that techies are often completely out of touch with what the average Joe wants.
- dkarl 4y 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."
  - olalonde 4y ago
    I assume you don't believe this is a good thing? How would you measure "what the average Joe wants"?
    - artogahr 4y ago
      I'm inclined to make the comment that the "average Joe" doesn't actually know what he wants, in respect to what's actually good for him in the long term.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - mellavora 4y ago
      Well, if you look at i.e. Meta, which specifically optimised for getting people to 'click' more, it is clear that they did so by building a product with disastrous impacts on mental health. So there is at least one example where it isn't a good thing.
      - olalonde 4y ago
        You can build something people want and which is bad for health, they're not mutually exclusive. People commonly want things that are linked to negative health outcomes: alcohol, sugar, fast food, lack of physical activity, working a high stress job, living in a city, watching the news, etc. Personally, I take the position that people best know what's good for them because I don't see good alternatives to that.
r90t 4y 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
controversial97 4y 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 4y ago
  Do you mean the throbber (image that animated to show when a page was loading)? http://www.netscape-communications.com/netscapes-throbber-and-logos/ http://www.netscape-communications.com/netscapes-throbber-an...
  - controversial97 4y ago
    It was an animated gif on a web page.
Tepix 4y 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_k 4y 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.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  That or banks. Certain major US bank I am using can't function with Origin on.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    My bank website doesn't have third party ads anyway.
    - bo1024 4y ago
      It might have third party trackers (Facebook, Google, Twitter, typekit.net whatever that is, etc). It might also have first party trackers of e.g. your mouse and keyboard that you’d rather disable.
martyvis 4y ago
Anton didn't like PDF either :- https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-not-pdf.html https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-not-pdf.html
- john61 4y ago
  And he is correct that pages and fixed layout do not make sense for electronic media even if printed.
  - mhd 4y 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_a 4y 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.
forgotmypw17 4y 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 4y ago
  Are there any version of Mosaic that are able to handle modern HTTPS?
  - josteink 4y ago
    Probably if using a local HTTP proxy to relay the actual traffic?
  - II2II 4y 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.
  - forgotmypw17 4y 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.
somecommit 4y 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.
- SuperSandro2000 4y ago
  The paper letter from the 19 hundreds is also still working perfectly, just a little bit dusty and yellowed.
- exodust 4y 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. }
- mhd 4y ago
  I’m getting a lot of mileage out of this simple bookmarklet found here: https://maya.land/bookmarklets/readable/ https://maya.land/bookmarklets/readable/ Centered max-width without going all out reader mode.
casey2 4y 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 4y ago
Today a website doesn’t even load without JavaScript. So, there’s that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee 4y 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.
jussij 4y 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.
- queuebert 4y 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.
  - jussij 4y 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 4y ago
Not Mosaic but worth browsing : the capsules in the Geminiverse ( https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ ) have no modern browser gimmick at all and a very good signal-to-noise ration. #my2cents
_greim_ 4y 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 4y 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_ 4y 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 https://gist.github.com/caseywatts/c0cec1f89ccdb8b469b1
incanus77 4y 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 4y 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.
  - incanus77 4y ago
    Yeah, same. Likely UNIX utilities, Linux software or howtos (Red Hat, Debian), maybe usenet. Maybe an FTP repository?
    - incanus77 4y ago
      Maybe a combination of these — I found this: http://hep.itp.tuwien.ac.at/~www/particle/Doc/debnotes.html http://hep.itp.tuwien.ac.at/~www/particle/Doc/debnotes.html Debian 1.x/2.x days, likely a prominent mirror?
    - int_19h 4y ago
      It's the Vienna University of Technology, and places like that often run mirrors.
- yesenadam 4y 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 https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
jagger27 4y ago
The source code of that page is beautiful.
xtracto 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Back in the day mozplugger avoided lots of JS crapware.
cptskippy 4y 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_19h 4y 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.
  - cptskippy 4y 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 4y ago
Insight! Good points still valid today. Although I wonder if the author has changed his opinion on browser.
djohnston 4y 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!

284 points by artogahr 4y 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.

rrwo 4y 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.
- badsectoracula 4y 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 4y 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.
  - rrwo 4y ago
    Not every site uses "node junk" or even jQuery.
    - loloquwowndueo 4y ago
      That’s why parent said “the average site” and not “every site”.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    That has nothing to do with Node.
  - sumtechguy 4y ago
    Javascript is so good we hide it with transpilers so we do not have to use it.
- lucideer 4y 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.
  - rrwo 4y ago
    Just because Twitter does that doesn't mean it is the case everywhere else. It moves some of the rendering work from the backend (having to query the data and generate markup) to the browser (query the API and generate the content based on the responses). At my current job, it's made a significant improvement. The server returns compact JSON data instead of HTML, so it's easier to generate the data and uses less bandwidth. It also looks faster for the user, because they change search parameters and only part of the page changes, rather than reloading the entire page. As for "easier to maintain", that may be subjective. Code to generate a simple HTML template from results is replaced by JavaScript code to hit the API and generate the DOM. Although HTML5 templates makes that much easier.
    - lucideer 4y ago
      I'm not saying it's impossible - glad to hear you've successfully implemented it in your workplace. I'm just saying that by-and-large it has the opposite effect to the stated intent. If most examples of a strategy make things worse, and only one person uses that strategy to improve things, then going around saying "everyone is doing it wrong" rather than questioning the strategy isn't particularly sound. I've build plenty of (small) client-side rendered UIs myself that lazy-load content; I know the trade-offs and I even believe I can achieve a performant outcome on my own. But that's anecdotal. In the wild, I have not seen a single major website improve perf. via lazy-fetched content rendering.
- weberer 4y 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.
  - Altho 4y ago
    It's a tradeoff, basically the question is "Will most users need and read all the content or not". Displaying everything at once without making extra querries is best, but not always possible . The frontend is fetching the backend. So it's going to say "Hey, send me all the comments from all the posts from november 2021". If there are 3 it's fine, but if there are like 23,000 of them you can't really load everything at once , that's why we use pagination on the backend. We say "Hey send me results 1 to 25 of the comments from all the posts from November 2021" This way the frontend only displays 25 comments for a quick page load and we hope that it will be enough. To display the other comments either we ask the backend to let us know how many pages of 25 elements there are and we display that amount of pagination element links (pagination), or we simply tell the frontend to ask the next page once we reach the bottom (infinite scroll). Even if displaying all the content is possible, if there are content that only 1% of your users will read you might want to offer faster loading for 99% of users and add a few seconds of loading for the 1%.
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      > "Will most users need and read all the content or not" For the main content, yes, yes, most will. Why are they on the website in the first place? Especially the main content. Sure, some things you can load later, like comments, etc
    - simion314 4y ago
      >This way the frontend only displays 25 comments for a quick page load Many years ago smart frameworks implemented smart stuff like you can display only what is visible. For example you could have a table with 1 million rows but in your html page you will not create 1 million row elements, you can create GUI widgets only for the visible part, as the user scrolls you can recycle existing widgets. As a practical example , you go to a yotube channel page and they load only 2 or 3 rows of videos and you have to scroll to force more to appear, this means you can't do a Ctrl+F and seatrch and is also less efficient because as you scroll the items at the top are not recycled and reuse so probably more memory is used. The json for all the videos is not huge,some strings with title and thumbnails, maybe some numbers but the issue is that is not possible to natively do the best/correct thing, only recently we got lazy loading for example so basicaly html was desibned for documents and frameworks/toolkits designed for apps did the correct thing many years ago... this is an explanation but no excuse why things are such a shit show with pagination today.
- tannhaeuser 4y 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 4y ago
Yeah, who needs google maps anyway? Just use the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  Yeah, well. There are a few things that are worth whitelisting.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapscii https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapscii
- forgotmypw17 4y 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.
  - danielbln 4y ago
    > it no longer displays zip codes Strange, it does for me, everywhere where it shows an address.
  - Qub3d 4y ago
    DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps, which has quietly become a solid alternative the past few years. (https://xkcd.com/2617/ https://xkcd.com/2617/)
    - forgotmypw17 4y ago
Altho 4y 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 4y ago
  Webapps vs websites. Should be no need for any website to require JavaScript to function.
tannhaeuser 4y 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.
SuperSandro2000 4y ago
I think it's worth my time to not need to go to the post box every day and exchange dead trees.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  What does physical mail have to do with anything? You can get email without Javascript in your browser
jmclnx 4y 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 :)
ecmascript 4y 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.
- danjoredd 4y 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.
  - ecmascript 4y ago
    I'm not upset, I am just curious and think the guy had quite the ignorant take on the whole subject matter. I kind of disagree though, most websites do need javascript even if they simply contain only an article. Extremely few devs will care about the astonishing minority that disables javascript by default and saying that the websites that do this is trash, like so many people that favor this kind of thinking does, is being ignorant. The javascript hate is strange because it's like people would hate programs written in python for no other reason than the program being written in python. I think it comes down to devs not being able to chose and that the only real choice is already made for them so then they end up hating it. But even alternatives like Phoenix Liveview / Hotwire that minimizes the usage of javascript requires javascript to work properly. In time I believe most websites will ship a wasm binary and then this debate will be over forever and javascript will become irrelevant. But what do I know? :)

smilespray 4y ago

tannhaeuser 4y ago

> 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).

badsectoracula 4y 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 4y ago
  It might be talking about pages that used tables for styling/layout

jansan 4y ago

technion 4y ago
There is a current front page article on the same blog, I suspect someone browsed from that and shared what they found.
- artogahr 4y ago
  I indeed did! I thought people here would find it interesting.
b112 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20000824172326/geraldholmes.freeyellow.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000824172326/geraldholmes.free...

derane 4y ago

wie kommt das hier hoch ? 16 Points ?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
martin_a 4y ago
Please speak English, fellow German, it's more polite.

rrwo 4y ago

This aged well.

tiborsaas 4y ago

Also known as ideology driven browsing.

dave84 4y 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.

myfonj 4y 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.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-ancient-browsers.html http://web.archive.org/web/19970106091058/http://www.complan...
- artogahr 4y 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).

badsectoracula 4y 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 https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf

tannhaeuser 4y 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 4y ago
  Go to Firefox settings and disable auto-update? `about:config` > `app.update.auto: false`

YesThatTom2 4y 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 4y 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.
rrwo 4y 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.
Ensorceled 4y 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.
- naasking 4y 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.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mrtksn 4y 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 4y ago
This article is from 1999, what do you mean?
badsectoracula 4y 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.
- loloquwowndueo 4y 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 :)
  - Qub3d 4y ago
    We've made machines so much faster that a lot of old software is unusable because its too fast. One of my favorite examples: Lego Island's driving mechanic is tied to frame rate, so on a modern machine tapping left or right will fling your car 90+ degrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CmqbccCqI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CmqbccCqI0

rvieira 4y ago

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

raverbashing 4y 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 https://developers.redhat.com/author/dj-delorie

protomikron 4y 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

frou_dh 4y ago

How do you know that someone chooses to disable JavaScript in their browser? Answer: Don't worry, they'll tell you about it.

quickthrower2 4y ago
They probably use Arch Linux
- AndrewVos 4y ago
  Uhh rude. I use arch btw
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    But do you disable JavaScript?
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      No I rewrite the JavaScript in Rust
forgotmypw17 4y 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 4y 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.

olalonde 4y ago

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

dkarl 4y 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."
- olalonde 4y ago
  I assume you don't believe this is a good thing? How would you measure "what the average Joe wants"?
  - artogahr 4y ago
    I'm inclined to make the comment that the "average Joe" doesn't actually know what he wants, in respect to what's actually good for him in the long term.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - mellavora 4y ago
    Well, if you look at i.e. Meta, which specifically optimised for getting people to 'click' more, it is clear that they did so by building a product with disastrous impacts on mental health. So there is at least one example where it isn't a good thing.
    - olalonde 4y ago
      You can build something people want and which is bad for health, they're not mutually exclusive. People commonly want things that are linked to negative health outcomes: alcohol, sugar, fast food, lack of physical activity, working a high stress job, living in a city, watching the news, etc. Personally, I take the position that people best know what's good for them because I don't see good alternatives to that.

r90t 4y 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

controversial97 4y 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 4y ago
Do you mean the throbber (image that animated to show when a page was loading)? http://www.netscape-communications.com/netscapes-throbber-and-logos/ http://www.netscape-communications.com/netscapes-throbber-an...
- controversial97 4y ago
  It was an animated gif on a web page.

Tepix 4y 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_k 4y 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.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
That or banks. Certain major US bank I am using can't function with Origin on.
- timbit42 4y ago
  My bank website doesn't have third party ads anyway.
  - bo1024 4y ago
    It might have third party trackers (Facebook, Google, Twitter, typekit.net whatever that is, etc). It might also have first party trackers of e.g. your mouse and keyboard that you’d rather disable.

martyvis 4y ago

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

john61 4y ago
And he is correct that pages and fixed layout do not make sense for electronic media even if printed.
- mhd 4y 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_a 4y 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.

forgotmypw17 4y 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 4y ago
Are there any version of Mosaic that are able to handle modern HTTPS?
- josteink 4y ago
  Probably if using a local HTTP proxy to relay the actual traffic?
- II2II 4y 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.
- forgotmypw17 4y 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.

somecommit 4y 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.

SuperSandro2000 4y ago
The paper letter from the 19 hundreds is also still working perfectly, just a little bit dusty and yellowed.
exodust 4y 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. }
mhd 4y ago
I’m getting a lot of mileage out of this simple bookmarklet found here: https://maya.land/bookmarklets/readable/ https://maya.land/bookmarklets/readable/ Centered max-width without going all out reader mode.

casey2 4y 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 4y ago

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

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

0xbadcafebee 4y 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.

jussij 4y 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.

queuebert 4y 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.
- jussij 4y 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 4y ago

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

_greim_ 4y 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 4y 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_ 4y 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 https://gist.github.com/caseywatts/c0cec1f89ccdb8b469b1

incanus77 4y 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 4y 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.
- incanus77 4y ago
  Yeah, same. Likely UNIX utilities, Linux software or howtos (Red Hat, Debian), maybe usenet. Maybe an FTP repository?
  - incanus77 4y ago
    Maybe a combination of these — I found this: http://hep.itp.tuwien.ac.at/~www/particle/Doc/debnotes.html http://hep.itp.tuwien.ac.at/~www/particle/Doc/debnotes.html Debian 1.x/2.x days, likely a prominent mirror?
  - int_19h 4y ago
    It's the Vienna University of Technology, and places like that often run mirrors.
yesenadam 4y 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 https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html

jagger27 4y ago

The source code of that page is beautiful.

xtracto 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Back in the day mozplugger avoided lots of JS crapware.

cptskippy 4y 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_19h 4y 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.
- cptskippy 4y 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 4y ago

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

djohnston 4y 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!