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Text-only CNN

lite.cnn.io

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Re: Text-only CNN

#71

Post by knight17 »

DesiLurker wrote: post #63
cnst wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree; text-based sites are the worst for this, due to all the tracking they do in JavaScript. I've been using Brave for a while now, on both laptop and Android. Any time I try to load pretty much any website in Chrome on Android or SeaMonkey on laptop, it's just so painfully slow compared to Brave!

I am quite paranoid about extensions stealing my data and identity. How do you ensure that level of security with Brave etc? is it open source?

Yes, Brave browser is open-source: https://github.com/brave

Re: Text-only CNN

#72

Post by godzillabrennus »

stephengillie wrote: post #68
DalekBaldwin wrote: post #8

My laptop can run computationally-intensive physics simulations and play streaming hi-def video with no problem, but if I click a link to a mainstream news article it just about keels over and dies. How did our grandparents ever manage to load the news on an underpowered machine called "paper"?

Paper is rendered entirely server-side. Taking out a full-page newspaper ad is an attention-grabber. Taking out a full-page pop-up is merely an annoyance. Why does this perception exist? Why isn't digital space regarded on-par with paper space? Because of this, digital ads sell for much, much less than paper ads. And so ad-supported companies have to use 10x as many ads to get 1/10 the revenue. And these ads can gain…

It's also worth trying out http://www.brave.com if you want a lot of this bundled into a browser.

Re: Text-only CNN

#73

Post by dclowd9901 »

banned1 wrote: post #48

If only CNN would go back to being the old but trusted, amazing CNN, with Christiane Amanpour at the landing in Mogadishu during Restore Hope, or Bernie Shaw at the hotel in Baghdad for Desert Storm. Now, a shell of its old self, CNN is just MSNBC's cousin, with people who say "we, ahem, I mean, the Democrats, are losing Michigan" live on screen. Oh well. It's been years since I relied on CNN. But on the technical fr…

I think they appeal to the majority sentiment which sways dem or rep depending on who's in office. They were much more center-right while Obama was at the helm.

Re: Text-only CNN

#78

Post by newscracker »

jagger27 wrote: post #24
vortico wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a collaborative community effort for "fixing" websites to make this "100 steps forward"? The relative ease and the large benefit of doing so make it surprising I haven't seen a list of lite websites maintained by volunteers.

Firefox's reader mode?

In my understanding, Firefox Reader Mode (and similar features in other browsers) reads in the entire page and, based on analyzing the page for cues, then decides to offer the user an option to choose reader view (or not).

So while it helps improve readability, it doesn't cut down the time to load, the amount of data downloaded, and probably helps improve the battery life only marginally (this is debatable, depending on the amount of active JS, auto-play videos and also at what time offset t the user chooses reader mode after the page loads).

Re: Text-only CNN

#79

Post by heipei »

ascom wrote: post #3

EDIT: As I wrote this, someone deployed a server-side rendered version of the site. Now the site is perfect. :) This site appears to load ~350 KB of JavaScript, which I think is a bit excessive for a "lite" text-only site. From the sourcemaps, I found a long list of libraries, including: * react * redux * redux-thunk * react-router * axios * base64-js (why not window.atob/btoa?) * core-js * fbjs * react-hot-loader (s…

Almost anything is better than CNN: https://urlscan.io/result/6834c63f-b092-4e4e-b72b-91bd1c1b82... This is on par with other shitty news-websites.

This website contacted 65 IPs in 7 countries across 35 domains to perform 314 HTTP transactions. [...] In total, 4 MB of data was transfered, which is 12 MB uncompressed. It took 2.753 seconds to load this page.

Compare this to the now-SSR cnn.io: https://urlscan.io/result/7d13efac-ffaa-4ac2-a091-8611e39b20... (59kB transfer)

Edit: Someone scanned the lite-version before they switched to SSR: https://urlscan.io/result/2a9690eb-3992-4712-a657-c3be959d51...

Re: Text-only CNN

#80

Post by xfs »

DalekBaldwin wrote: post #8

My laptop can run computationally-intensive physics simulations and play streaming hi-def video with no problem, but if I click a link to a mainstream news article it just about keels over and dies. How did our grandparents ever manage to load the news on an underpowered machine called "paper"?

I think it's a recent phenomenon and not related to rendering of ads.

I use Chrome and it's quite common, but not always. I would turn up the developer console and find thousands of errors and warnings when I notice the tab icon keeps blinking. The errors are mostly blocking of third-party plugins, security domain violations or similar content policy enforcement. And it just keeps reloading the same requests.

I don't have any ad blocking or any extension installed so this should be a wide spread thing. It's probably overzealous ad providers ignoring Chrome's security policies.

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