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Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

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Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#81

Post by mattl »

Altho wrote: post #60
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #3

My 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…

Webapps vs websites.

Should be no need for any website to require JavaScript to function.

Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#82

Post by wruza »

weberer wrote: post #37
tannhaeuser wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

I am using opera with “tree tabs” extension, but afair there is a similar (or the same?) extension for chrome. Although they do not hide the horizontal tab bar.

Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#83

Post by raverbashing »

Altho wrote: post #67
weberer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "Will most users need and read all the content or not"

For the main content, yes, yes, most will. Why are they on the website in the first place?

Especially the main content. Sure, some things you can load later, like comments, etc

Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#84

Post by Semaphor »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #58
badsectoracula wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

> Does a browser really have to be so complex

Does it have to? I don’t know. But it is. It’s an operating system where 3rd parties execute random code on, and you hope it stays sandboxed. Those websites? Thanks to ads, they don’t update once in a while, but usually once every few seconds.

Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#85

Post by somecommit »

Need some max-width to whatever the average screen was back in 1999.

True story, I re-uploaded a website that I wrote in 1999, only now I discover that my header was never centered, if was just floating left. It's the only thing that look off, everything else is working perfectly. HMTL/CSS/JS is really a stable stack for the computer field.

Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#86

Post by II2II »

exitb wrote: post #74
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #70

I 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 considera…

Are there any version of Mosaic that are able to handle modern HTTPS?

I don't know about Mosaic[1], but there are many alternatives out there. I frequently use elinks as a text only browser since it makes an attempt to layout pages (most pages have some form of layout to handle navigation elemnts these days). There are also browsers that handle graphics, but not scripting or CSS, if that is what you want.

[1] I have heard of people trying to get Mosaic to work on modern machines, but I think the efforts were restricted to rebuilding the software rather than adding features.

Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#87

Post by forgotmypw17 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #31
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #3

My modern version of this is browsing with JavaScript disabled. Most of the sites that don’t work weren’t worth my time anyway.

Yeah, who needs google maps anyway? Just use the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer

Google Maps is one of the sites I still whitelist, but I often reconsider this decision, and I'm ready to find a replacement.

Today's Google Maps is a shadow of its original self, which did have a no-JS version, by the way. It has gradually gotten simultaneously heavier, less convenient, more annoying, and less useful, and I've just about had it.

Just off the top of my head, it no longer displays zip codes, takes a long time to load, has missing street names on the map, often promotes features I do not want while taking away features I do want, and is covered so thick with paid-promotion items that I can barely find somewhere to click that isn't an ad.

Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#88

Post by forgotmypw17 »

frou_dh wrote: post #40

How do you know that someone chooses to disable JavaScript in their browser? Answer: Don't worry, they'll tell you about it.

How do you know someone has cognitive impairment which makes it difficult to use JS-heavy sites and/or is using an older device which has performance issues with heavy sites?

Answer: Don't worry, they just won't be able to use your site.

Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#89

Post by johannes1234321 »

jakub_g wrote: post #24
tannhaeuser wrote: post #19

Earlier 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`

What does then happen? Do I get some nudge to update?

I for one don't really mind the Autoupdate. I can't stand it that it forces me to restart while I am in some workflow. I'd be fine with "you should update, click here, when ready" which I can click five minutes later when done with the task.

Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)

#90

Post by forgotmypw17 »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #14

I was at a startup from 2000-2003 where the chief scientist was a security wonk and demanded that our product worked with and without JavaScript enabled. No wonder the startup failed. Imagine trying to make a useful product with one hand tied behind your back!

https://endtimes.dev/why-your-website-should-work-without-ja...
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