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A few months ago, I switched to using w3m inside emacs as my primary browser. w3m is not capable of handling Javascript at all. And you know what, for 90% of
by gnosis 13y ago
A few months ago, I switched to using w3m inside emacs as my primary browser.
w3m is not capable of handling Javascript at all. And you know what, for 90% of the websites I visit, it doesn't matter. They function fine and look fine without Javascript. And if w3m could manage to make most websites look fine without Javascript, so could Firefox -- if its developers cared.
As for non-technical users -- they're probably not going to be opening Firefox's Preferences dialog in the first place. And if they do, they probably aren't going to start randomly checking and unchecking stuff to see what it does. That's something an adventurous geek might try, but certainly not your typical non-technical user.
If Firefox developers wanted to additionally protect the average user from this dangerous button, they could have simply stuck it in the Advanced tab of the Preferences dialog, or added a scary warning about being doubly sure that the user knows what he's doing (like they do with about:config).
That said, I'm happy to use NoScript for this functionality anyway, as it's far more flexible than a blanket "turn off Javascript everywhere with no exceptions" button.
- jlgreco 13y agoWhat is your take on w3m vs elinks?
- gnosis 13y agoI really haven't used it much, except as my default external HTML->Text converter (via wget + HTML::FormatText::Elinks), of which it does a good job. Unfortunately, its main weakness is that (as far as I know) it's not integrated in to emacs as w3m is. If it was, I'd probably look to it as a serious contender. But since it's not, I'm afraid I'm stuck with w3m -- for better or for worse. (Right now, it's for better, as I'm quite satisfied with w3m -- except for my occasional Javascript needs, for which I fall back to Firefox, Opera, or Chromium).
- jlgreco 13y agoHmm, gotcha. I like elinks for it's pretty solid mouse/256color support in in terminal emulators but I haven't used it "from" other programs like emacs (just tmux). In that capacity, elinks is my primary browser for reading documentation (since I usually associate documentation with particular tmux sessions and leave it open for weeks or months on end). w3m has image support in some terminals though, which fascinates me. I feel like I should probably investigate that some more.
- keithpeter 13y ago"w3m has image support in some terminals though, which fascinates me. I feel like I should probably investigate that some more." xterm http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20120402 http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20120402 I installed the w3m-img package on Ubuntu 1304, running it in xterm allows image viewing inline. Irony: The Web page I linked to above has screen shots showing step by step how to install and run w3m. The Web page design requires javascript to display the screen shots! I wonder why web page designers do this?
- dotmanish 13y ago"As for non-technical users -- they're probably not going to be opening Firefox's Preferences dialog in the first place. And if they do, they probably aren't going to start randomly checking and unchecking stuff to see what it does." You would be surprised what non-geeks tend to do when they have no clue what to do.
- reeses 13y agoMy mother-in-law emailed my wife a one line message today asking why she's seeing ads on Facebook that she hadn't seen before. You are on the mark.
- nfriedly 13y ago> As for non-technical users -- they're probably not going to be opening Firefox's Preferences dialog in the first place. And if they do, they probably aren't going to start randomly checking and unchecking stuff... You clearly haven't worked with the same non-technical users I have. It took ages to figure out that "use TLS" getting unchecked was the reason our site wouldn't load for one particular visitor. I wholeheartedly support removing all of these check boxes.