Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger) • Hacker News Board

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#61

Post by caribousoup » Wed, May 13, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #58

"The small Internet" is a really important thing. Broadband access is not nearly as ubiquitous outside major cities as people believe. People in rural areas may have slow and unreliable (and probably expensive at the same time) connections and retro hardware. I've read about children climbing up old towers and waiting hours (!) for the school website to load so they can access their homework during the quarantine day…

I think this is the wrong solution.

We need strong whitelist controls in all of the browsers. Because when you connect to a website, you have no idea if it's going to start downloading 30 MB worth of images and 40 Javascript requests.

It's gone completely out of control. I say this as a web dev on a rural connection. Not only is it slow, I PAY for this, bandwidth is limited. For some lazy dev who doesn't compress their images, and it downloads without me noticing, I pay actual money for that.

If browser preferences has options for auto disabling Javascript on a webpage that initiated X amount of outbound connections, or auto stops when there are 30 img requests on page load, I should be in control of not allowing that. I should be in control of setting that threshold for different request types.

We don't need a second, lightweight web. We need to fix our tooling at the client level.

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#62

Post by qwerty456127 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

caribousoup wrote: post #61

qwerty456127 wrote: post #58

"The small Internet" is a really important thing. Broadband access is not nearly as ubiquitous outside major cities as people believe. People in rural areas may have slow and unreliable (and probably expensive at the same time) connections and retro hardware. I've read about children climbing up old towers and waiting hours (!) for the school website to load so they can access their homework during the quarantine day…

I think this is the wrong solution. We need strong whitelist controls in all of the browsers. Because when you connect to a website, you have no idea if it's going to start downloading 30 MB worth of images and 40 Javascript requests. It's gone completely out of control. I say this as a web dev on a rural connection. Not only is it slow, I PAY for this, bandwidth is limited. For some lazy dev who doesn't compress the…

> If browser preferences has options for auto disabling Javascript on a webpage that initiated X amount of outbound connections, or auto stops when there are 30 img requests on page load, I should be in control of not allowing that. I should be in control of setting that threshold for different request types.

I doubt this is hard to implement. Somebody can build a Firefox/Chromium fork (or even an extension perhaps?) implementing this functionality and they don't have to be a real genius. Once I needed that for some time I just used a local proxy to cache and limit what is downloaded.

The only problem is the actual web sites are not designed with the fact somebody might want to control them this way in mind and can easily happen to be unusable unless you let them download a ton of stuff.

I doubt the problem can be solved without some sort of enforcement by a major power (Google, governments or whatever). At the same time trying to enforce anything on the existing web doesn't seem making much sense to me.

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#63

Post by taborj » Wed, May 13, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #54

I maintain a .plan file and finger server at peter@tcp.rip / finger://peter@tcp.rip/ if you want to try something out.

I need to get my NodeMCU weather station back online so I can feed it to my .plan file and run fingerd again.

Back in the 90s, it was good fun seeing all the stuff people put out on finger. Aside from the link someone else posted to Shodan, is there a list of finger servers anywhere?

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#64

Post by ddevault » Wed, May 13, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

julienXX wrote: post #51

hawski wrote: post #32

Looks very nice. Please, add also basic HTML (no CSS, no JS) rendering. Link tags like next in header are sometimes used to add some structure, that is seldom exposed by browsers.

Thought about it but I prefer to focus on alternative protocols for now.

Dropping in to encourage you to not add HTML/CSS/other web shit. We already have web browsers, and I appreciate that you're working on something distinct. Keep up the good work.

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#65

Post by piffey » Wed, May 13, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

apatters wrote: post #5

kick wrote: post #2

For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design…

I was delighted when I saw that Gemini is maintained by someone on SDF (named Solderpunk, never heard of him before). This seems as good a time as any to plug https://sdf.org , a great little community which has the feel of a 90s BBS that never went offline.

Forever grateful for SDF. Graduated into the last depression, was super broke, my computer died, and I could barely get hours between two restaurant jobs just to make rent. For about 3 years used SDF from the library to keep my dev spaces up, learned to work entirely from the terminal. Now I rarely leave one. Should log back in on there. Had all the tools for doing work and for learning bits about computings past.

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#66

Post by caribousoup » Wed, May 13, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #62

caribousoup wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the wrong solution. We need strong whitelist controls in all of the browsers. Because when you connect to a website, you have no idea if it's going to start downloading 30 MB worth of images and 40 Javascript requests. It's gone completely out of control. I say this as a web dev on a rural connection. Not only is it slow, I PAY for this, bandwidth is limited. For some lazy dev who doesn't compress the…

> If browser preferences has options for auto disabling Javascript on a webpage that initiated X amount of outbound connections, or auto stops when there are 30 img requests on page load, I should be in control of not allowing that. I should be in control of setting that threshold for different request types. I doubt this is hard to implement. Somebody can build a Firefox/Chromium fork (or even an extension perhaps?)…

I agree, it's not difficult to implement.

For instance, in Apple Mail, there is a setting that is labeled: Prompt me to skip messages over X MB. I bet almost nobody ever sets this up. But I do. I get a prompt asking me if I want to download 20MB of attachments. It also lets me skip downloading remote content in messages, but I can override and allow it with a click of a button.

If browsers had similar advanced options, that users needed to manually enable, then those users would understand what's happening when a website isn't working because of the content blocking.

There are lots of possible UI implementations. A button that says: X amount of things were blocked, would you like to reload the page and disable blocking? Or replace img tags (etc) with placeholder buttons, and click the placeholder to initiate the http request.

Safari has recently done some great UI for controlling which websites have access to autoplay. I would like to see this expanded, where I can choose to either blacklist or whitelist Javascript, or images and videos over X MB.

I don't think it needs enforcement, I mean, you can't control anything on the client end already. We already have APIs to check if cookies etc are enabled. We could expand this to check for other fine grain controls, like are images enabled. Or just use the noscript tag, which devs should be doing anyways but usually don't.

Anyways. For those on slow connections... this problem will only get worse over time. Something will eventually need to be done about it, otherwise like 20% of the connections are going to get left behind unable to even use the web.

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#67

Post by mr_spothawk » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #58

"The small Internet" is a really important thing. Broadband access is not nearly as ubiquitous outside major cities as people believe. People in rural areas may have slow and unreliable (and probably expensive at the same time) connections and retro hardware. I've read about children climbing up old towers and waiting hours (!) for the school website to load so they can access their homework during the quarantine day…

> Broadband access is not nearly as ubiquitous outside major cities as people believe.

Neither as ubiquitous nor as necessary, i think.

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#68

Post by DyslexicAtheist » Wed, May 13, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

julienXX wrote: post #52

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any idea about how to make the font in castor bigger? the default size is impossible for me to read. I tried the usual keyboard shortcuts but doesn't work. Do I have to set some gtk env variables maybe so it uses the correct size font?

Somebody (you?) asked for this feature this morning. I'll add it to the settings. For now it takes your default GTK3 font so I think you can change it globally somewhere.

thanks for getting back. You're right it was in the config file, my problem was that I had the font name surrounded by quotes and so it wasn't recognized. This works:

  cat .config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini 
  [Settings]
  gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=true
  gtk-font-name = DejaVu Sans Regular 12
  ...

for some reason ~/.gtkrc-2.0 needs variable values quoted, but gtk-3.0 doesn't.

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#69

Post by sloum » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:07 PM UTC

cookiengineer wrote: post #35

kick wrote: post #2

For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design…

From an implementor's view I decided to not implement Gemini as it is specified, because I do not like its text/gemini default format. They should either decide for a specified full file format, e.g. CommonMark or HTML5 (with index.html as default routes) or don't try to implement a file format inside a network protocol at all. In my opinion, file structures (and layouts thereof) should have nothing to do with a netw…

Having been involved in the VERY LONG conversation re: markup for gemini I can say there were a lot of considerations. There was definitely talk about whether a format fit into the protocol at all. The text/gemini format was landed on as a simple way to have baseline text linkages that all clients would recognize. It has the added benefit of being simple to write, simple to read, simple to parse.

Because servers send mime-types in their response there is literally nothing stopping a client from implementing a full html rendering engine, a markdown rendering system etc. for when they receive documents of those types.

Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

#70

Post by sloum » Wed, May 13, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

caribousoup wrote: post #66

qwerty456127 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If browser preferences has options for auto disabling Javascript on a webpage that initiated X amount of outbound connections, or auto stops when there are 30 img requests on page load, I should be in control of not allowing that. I should be in control of setting that threshold for different request types. I doubt this is hard to implement. Somebody can build a Firefox/Chromium fork (or even an extension perhaps?)…

I agree, it's not difficult to implement. For instance, in Apple Mail, there is a setting that is labeled: Prompt me to skip messages over X MB. I bet almost nobody ever sets this up. But I do. I get a prompt asking me if I want to download 20MB of attachments. It also lets me skip downloading remote content in messages, but I can override and allow it with a click of a button. If browsers had similar advanced option…

The problem is that sites fail without their JS. Oftentimes even if that JS is purely decorative and shouldnt be required for a site to function. I block all known google domains on my laptop and as a result am cut off from a great many sites (blocks ads and captchas). I also use the dillo browser and disable css, js, and images. It is an unusable mess. Gopher and gemini provide a content first approach that will not work for everything and is in no way going to _replace_ the web. But is really great for certain types of content/discourse.