12 ms·
If you are happy not surfing most of the Web, any computer is good enough. It's usually browsers and web pages that brings these older PCs down.
by abricot 4y ago
If you are happy not surfing most of the Web, any computer is good enough.
It's usually browsers and web pages that brings these older PCs down.
- caycep 4y agoI remember the first time I saw it, "we have to run it on a Sun workstation or else..."
- sourcecodeplz 4y agoI've heard there's quite the group here on HN that browse the web on CLI browsers.
- canadianfella 4y ago[dead]
- mjhay 4y agoIt's not something that's remotely practical on most modern sites. I hate everything new as well, but at some point it's easier to just suck it up and face the hell that is the modern internet.
- prmoustache 4y agoThe thing is w3m really filter yourself out of the shitty web. Most interesting websites are quite readable on w3m. The ones that aren't are usually the worst ones or thoses that provide an api for which better gui and tui clients exist.
- bandrami 4y agoWhen I'm on lynx I find I don't miss the rest of the Web. Reading documents without people constantly trying to sell me crap is kind of refreshing.
- nortonham 4y agoI agree with what you're saying but firefox with ublock origin and reader mode is definitely useful
- chaxor 4y agoIs there a good way to automatically *always* have reader mode on? Better yet, are there any ways to *not even load the other junk*, just load the text only for the reader mode. As far as I understand, Firefox still loads everything, does the parsing for everything, loads all those ads etc (and no, uBO does not get all of them), and then - *if you click the reader button in the URL box* - it will switch to reader mode. Seems quite backwards to the point of not really a workable solution for the automation junkie programmers of HN. Would be nice to have a solution with better defaults to give reader mode automatically, default use uMatrix (much better than noscript btw) for control native to the browser, etc for a more snappy and controllable (with paths to private and secure) browsing experience. Having a tui would be icing on the cake. Lynx just works though, and sidesteps all the js junk.
- account42 4y ago> Better yet, are there any ways to not even load the other junk, just load the text only for the reader mode. You can use uMatrix to default block all stylesheets and JS. Then apply your own user stylesheet.
- JohnFen 4y ago> I hate everything new as well It's not about hating new things. It's about things making tradeoffs that don't make sense to some.
- pjmlp 4y agoI used Lynx every now and then, back in the mid-90's. Eventually it is time to move on.
- andai 4y agoBeen a while, but I had a better time with w3m. I think it was the only textmode browser I tried that preserved the nesting of comments on HN. Context: I was on a 3kbps connection and basically everything was unusable, so I ran a textmode browser on a VPS over Mosh.
- anthk 4y agoI did that, literally the same, but with lynx/links instead of w3m over a pubnix with mosh. Also, gopher sites thru gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://magical.fish. I could even play some streaming radio with OPUS @16KBPS from http://dir.xiph.org http://dir.xiph.org once I set mplayer to cache the 90% of the stream.
- andai 4y agoYeah, I set up my own Opus mirror of Chilledcow's Lofi station ;) Necessity is the mother of reading manpages!
- rewgs 4y agoI use w3m as often as I can. I already pretty much live in the command line, and text-heavy sites like HN or some sort of documentation look just fine (or, IMO, even better) via w3m. Not always, but often. It's a very nice option to have.
- rkta 4y agoThis is the second comment here claiming that w3m displays HN correctly - what am I doing wrong? Most comments are not correctly indented.
- specialist 4y agoIs there a @media query type thing for TTY devices? Some way to tell the server to render text-only, gopher, or gemtext (from gemini protocol)?
- Sakos 4y agoI used to use a CLI client for Reddit primarily. It was great. Maybe I should check that out again...something about the CLI really appeals to me.
- anthk 4y agoYou have ttrv and lynx gopher://gopherddit.com.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- amatecha 4y agoWe do have basically latest Firefox on OpenBSD. But yeah, to be fair, I have to restart Firefox frequently on my X230's running OpenBSD. It either just stops rendering altogether (literally even application UI fails to render) or eats up so much memory and CPU the cooling fan is just always running at a kinda high level. Otherwise, it's super solid and a great OS for older machines IMO.
- fsckboy 4y ago> restart Firefox frequently on my X230's running OpenBSD what wildly multithreaded memory hogs are you running? I love my x230s, and I have dozens and dozens of windows open all the time. probably I benefit a good bit from running ublock Origin and uMatrix, but I have gigabytes of RAM free. I don't think running a newer machine would give me any benefits at all.
- amatecha 4y agoThe problem of Firefox "freezing" (rendering no longer working and UI elements like menu/scroll broken) and requiring a restart I don't think relates to memory. For example the browser is only using around 1.8gb at this moment and the machine has 8gb of RAM. I've been in contact with the Firefox OpenBSD maintainer (landry@) and he didn't have any certain indication from the logs/data I provided. He says he runs into the same problem, and simply quits/reopens. He's given a couple other steps to try getting more debugging data but otherwise, the cause is thus far unknown. (oh and yeah I have no intention of using a newer system, I bought four X230's and an X220 for dirt cheap lol)
- jamiek88 4y agoHmmm. Interesting. What changes when the program closes and restarts other than memory refresh would be the obvious starting point. I like hunting these things down, may take a look!
- fsckboy 4y agoI quit (actually I pkill) and then I restart and restore previous session with wifi/internet turned off. Then I turn internet back on and use the tabs that I want, and they reload only when I use them. If one of them misbehaves, I'll find out when I get there, but generally, I'm closing other tabs first so whatever interaction it may have been might be gone. if I don't do this when i restart, HN tells me it can't serve pages that fast :)
- drpixie 4y agoPresumably the result of Google making Chromium more and more like a whole OS (and everyone else following along). Is it ridiculous to give a browser such fine-grained access to your computer? If we were actually designing web standards for usability (instead of for maximising attention) our browsers would look al= lot more like Web 1.0 and nothing like Web 3.0!
- fooker 4y agoIt was java applets or flash before this.
- account42 4y agoWebsites that required Java or Flash for basic functionality like navigation or showing text were always ridiculed. But somehow what is now supposed to be acceptable for JS-heavy sites?
- ironmagma 4y agoUnaffiliated, but I hope Ladybird takes off as a new contender for a modern browser. It seems to have something resembling critical mass.
- emodendroket 4y agoWhy? Is there something wrong with the concept of Web apps?
- modo_mario 4y agoI wouldn't say so in and off itself but it can be argued using a thousandfold more resources to get the same functionality is wrong. The reasons for this are manifold and not just coming from those making cross platform easy to hire for web tech. (Tho it would be nice if those web stacks were also less bloated) In a more ideal world we'd have a few cross UI options already and the companies behind OS's running them would have incentive to support that.
- 4y ago
- layer8 4y agoThat’s just exemplifying how the web tech stack has been going astray, isn’t it?
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoSomewhat. But more so how the web transformed from interconnected documents to interconnected applications built on tech meant for documents.
- dangus 4y agoGone astray? Astray from what? Text and forms? The web has gotten exponentially more useful. The fact that my computer needs to be trivially more modern to use it seems like a completely reasonable trade-off. You couldn't buy a fully functioning computer for $35 in 2023 dollars back before the web "went astray." That wouldn't even buy you a modem!
- userbinator 4y agoOr apps that have no business being webapps, but somehow are. When a chat and video/audio call client take 4GB all by itself...
- winter_blue 4y agoIt's bloat caused by stuff like Electron, and people choosing to write desktop apps in HTML + JavaScript/TypeScript + some framework. If people even used a framework like Qt (a really mature and well-maintained desktop framework the favored framework of KDE Plasma, etc.), their memory usage would be so much lower. (I'm not counting the memory used by Qt's shared .so / dynamic library files.)
- Gigachad 4y agoIs virtually every single company and developer wrong? Or is Qt actually not that good, forcing people to use Electron despite it's resource usage? I find it far easier to believe that Qt and GTK have fallen behind rather than the whole world is under a grand delusion and didn't know Qt exists.
- bandrami 4y agoElectron lets you write a graphical application without knowing what you're doing. Whether this is "right" or "wrong" is a difficult question to answer.
- Gigachad 4y agoI have a hard time believing that companies like Discord are using Electron simply because they do not know what they are doing.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoI completely agree with you. It would be extremely odd for a company like Discord, who has done things like using nightly Rust in production, to naively choose Electron because they "don't know what they're doing" with native apps. Many people on HN either don't understand or don't care for trading off runtime performance and other technical qualities for other things like e.g. development speed, DX, easier hiring, etc.
- chaxor 4y agoIsn't like 99% of the reason/bloat on today's computers due to the massive amount of surveillance, telemetry, and phoning home with analytics of everything we do to a huge list of companies? I should imagine that removing simply that would make a lot more possible on older hardware, especially when it comes to base operating systems. Removing much of the unnecessary visuals that the web has today by using something like lynx may get much of the browsing experience desired as well.
- imachine1980_ 4y agoNot, is about blouted virtual dom and big and ever-growing standard who need to be run in every plataform and architecture whit the millions of edge cases while patch constantly for security