Anton didn't like PDF either :- https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/why-not-pdf.html
Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
61–70 of 285 posts
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#62Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#63Earlier 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.
Download firefox from the mozilla website instead of using the ubuntu package and this won't happen. Or disable auto upgrades.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#64So 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.
This strikes me as somewhat dismissive. My take is that the concerns raised in 1999 are even more true now. The problems we have with low-quality, bloated websites with questionable content are worse, and the rise of 'software that knows best' is only accelerating. If anything, this seems precient.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Given that the issue of Firefox being forced to restart primarily happens on Linux, I doubt Edge is an option for them. Though I have to concur that Edge has one of the most stable and smooth vertical tab implementations around, most of the plugin-based ones are more fully featured but much less reliable.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
Firefox, Chrome, etc. are also huge monoliths: that requires downloading the whole thing when any of the components change.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Using AJAX to hit internal APIs to load or update content improves performance of the site, and can make it easier to maintain.
Is there any evidence of this? All the sites I've seen that use extra requests to load text always seem to take multiple seconds to load. Whereas most pages that use server side rendering generally load under 100ms.
It's a tradeoff, basically the question is "Will most users need and read all the content or not". Displaying everything at once without making extra querries is best, but not always possible . The frontend is fetching the backend. So it's going to say "Hey, send me all the comments from all the posts from november 2021". If there are 3 it's fine, but if there are like 23,000 of them you can't really load everything at once , that's why we use pagination on the backend. We say "Hey send me results 1 to 25 of the comments from all the posts from November 2021" This way the frontend only displays 25 comments for a quick page load and we hope that it will be enough. To display the other comments either we ask the backend to let us know how many pages of 25 elements there are and we display that amount of pagination element links (pagination), or we simply tell the frontend to ask the next page once we reach the bottom (infinite scroll). Even if displaying all the content is possible, if there are content that only 1% of your users will read you might want to offer faster loading for 99% of users and add a few seconds of loading for the 1%.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#68Earlier 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.
A few weeks ago, I read that vertical tabs landed in Brave's nightly, but still behind a flag. So, there seems to be hope.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#69So 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.
> are probably a manifestation of fading youth.
When a program needs 3 build systems to build (ninja, meson, make) is probably a manifestation of exuberation.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#70I still use this strategy, though these days, I primarily use Mosaic and Netscape for testing.
I tend to browse without JavaScript enabled, except for places I already trust to not abuse it. And if there is anything blocking me from accessing the page, such as a modal dialog, a cookie notice, a survey, a prompt to sign up for the newsletter, I close the tab.
Over time, I have found that type of rude lack of consideration for the reader's cognitive load and ability to correlate highly with low-quality content that is a waste of my time to read, so this practice also saves me a lot of reading time.
And every day, my Internet gets better and better.
I like the term "featurism", I'm going to try to remember it.