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
Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
51–60 of 285 posts
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#52Around 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.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
This is infuriating to me as well. And the stupid Firefox restart dinosaur always comes up at the worst possible time. I would have switched to a new browser years ago, but Firefox seems to be the only one that supports vertical tabs.
Edge has vertical tabs built in. Many other browsers can be made to have vertical tabs with plugins.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#54So 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.
I don't remember ever being excited about disruptive software updates. If anything, I'm more patient at sitting through an app update on a weak cell signal than I was when I was younger.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
> and presumably on other OSs Nope, it only happens when something outside changed Firefox's files (in this case when Ubuntu swapped files because dpkg updated Firefox). This never happens* in Windows and macOS (it might nag, but you can definitely dismiss it). It seems that johnchristopher has a suggestion to disable auto-updates on a specific application in Debian and Ubuntu (haven't tested it though): https://news…
This is exactly right. And this happens because it needs to load libraries or exec subprocesses that aren't compatible between versions. Since the matching version of the file has been replaced with a newer one it doesn't really have a choice, it is unable to launch the new tab. The nice message is a better alternative than crashing.
This also doesn't occur on NixOS because the new version is in a different direcotry and the old version is kept until it is garbage collected.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Go to Firefox settings and disable auto-update? `about:config` > `app.update.auto: false`
Firefox's built-in auto-update doesn't have this problem. It only happens when an external package manager swaps out its files.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33201971 for a bit more context.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#57Still 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.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Yeah that is annoying, though personally i find browsers as the one category of software where i think this is fine, mainly because of security updates (it sucks that they tend to come with UI updates but at least on Firefox so far the main UI is fairly customizable and have made my own) but also because they are online software anyway .
Does a browser really have to be so complex that it warrants updates more often than the very sites that are being browsed? Contrast this with the design of idk MP3: a relatively simple and ultra-stable decoder app with a large variety of backend pipelines that can create MP3s. That's how the web pre-JS, pre-CSS was like. Or, with a perspective from information theory: downloading hundreds and hundreds of megabytes again and again (browsers), then consuming insane amounts of energy to access information that hasn't really changed all that much isn't very effective, is it?
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#59A good reminder that techies are often completely out of touch with what the average Joe wants.
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."
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#60My modern version of this is browsing with JavaScript disabled. Most of the sites that don’t work weren’t worth my time anyway.
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 and
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)