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Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
141–150 of 285 posts
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#142So 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.
Back in my day, when kids heard older people talking, they listened because they knew they were hearing from someone with more experience than themselves. Kids these days lost their ways and think that knowledge and judgement are achieved in youth and then gradually fade away. Just kidding, back in my day kids assumed the same thing. Also, this exact conversation has been happening since the web was created. Linked a…
I agree with your commentary along the lines of o tempora o mores, when you could argue the pattern remains largely the same.
In a more practical way though, some new things are good, some new thing are bad. It makes sense to adopt good stuff and cut off the bad. Deck? Mostly good. Requiring phone number to play a game? Bad. Naturally, it is a very subjective process and we are bound to disagree on details.
Not that long ago a family member tried to use the same argument used here ( its a generational thing; old people just hate new stuff ) when trying to convince that Venmo is actually good as I was trying to gently indicate that maybe a payment system that by default announces to the world[1] I just spent X on Y may not be the best thing since sliced bread. Working near that space I was amused, but each to their own ( and I certainly am not going to tell the guy how to raise his kids ).
[1]https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/venmo-explains-why-transac...
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still plenty of websites which run on HTTP. I know mine certainly do. Security isn't everything, there's also accessibility to think about. HTTPS breaks in many circumstances when it's not needed, including on current browsers. You can also use a stripping proxy. Bigger issues I've encountered with actually using Mosaic is that a) it does not support the Host header, so you must have a dedicated IP address, and b) it…
> Security isn't everything, there's also accessibility to think about. TLS is not just about security. It also protects the authenticity of your content, ensures privacy and even accessibility for your visitors. Without it, any node between your visitor and your server could inject content and JavaScript to do all sorts of nefarious tracking and profiling. These days there's really no excuse for using plain HTTP on…
It's not just your site: an HTTP site allows for injecting HTTP urls for images/css files on other sites, e.g.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#144I 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?
Honestly thinking on making a Mosaic clone. Without CSS or Javascript, I imagine it won't be terribly difficult to put together
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#145Earlier 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…
Firefox on Mac. I have this problem as well, even with "autoupdate" set to true. Also, if I am browsing in the middle of an auto update, it refuses to open new tabs. And each update logs me out of my password manager Worse, now this is happening to Thunderbird. Wasn't an issue until about a month ago. Now I need to re-install Thunderbird every few weeks because they've pushed an update. When from my point of view, as…
That sounds truly horrible. I've only recently returned to Mac OS as primary OS (one reason being annoyed by Ubuntu and FF) but why aren't you using Safari and Mail.app then if I may ask?
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#146I 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…
Not to mention people in the country suffer for featurism. In 2009 I had dial-up because broadband was unavailable where I was, and it took as long as 12 minutes to load some pages. I have since moved and no longer rely on dial-up, but I can only imagine how long it would take now with all the bloat happening. Honestly not sure how they do it these days.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The same could be said about the use of images on a site. The solution is to develop sites with accessibility in mind. Use a screen reader; experience what ALL your users will experience. Experiment with various rendering tools to emulate color blindness. There are even more tools to performance tune your website. This all comes down to the site author taking the time to cater to as many users as possible. It is not…
Hmm. No.
I think other poster wrote something to the effect of 'once something becomes popular and adopted by the masses, it ceases to be the ideal believers once strived for'.
If anything, it would appear that when you attempt to please everyone, you have to trade-off in places that some users may find unacceptable.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#148Earlier 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…
>This way the frontend only displays 25 comments for a quick page load
Many years ago smart frameworks implemented smart stuff like you can display only what is visible. For example you could have a table with 1 million rows but in your html page you will not create 1 million row elements, you can create GUI widgets only for the visible part, as the user scrolls you can recycle existing widgets.
As a practical example , you go to a yotube channel page and they load only 2 or 3 rows of videos and you have to scroll to force more to appear, this means you can't do a Ctrl+F and seatrch and is also less efficient because as you scroll the items at the top are not recycled and reuse so probably more memory is used.
The json for all the videos is not huge,some strings with title and thumbnails, maybe some numbers but the issue is that is not possible to natively do the best/correct thing, only recently we got lazy loading for example so basicaly html was desibned for documents and frameworks/toolkits designed for apps did the correct thing many years ago... this is an explanation but no excuse why things are such a shit show with pagination today.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what Twitter does. It's possibly the least performant major website I've used. Conditional loading certainly can improve perf. in theory. I've yet to see any evidence it does so in practice. The aggregate of bundle-size, bundle-parse, client-side execution resource-usage & added latency of the plethora of metadata normally bundled with API responses is more than enough to negate any actual perf. gains. As for…
Just because Twitter does that doesn't mean it is the case everywhere else. It moves some of the rendering work from the backend (having to query the data and generate markup) to the browser (query the API and generate the content based on the responses). At my current job, it's made a significant improvement. The server returns compact JSON data instead of HTML, so it's easier to generate the data and uses less band…
I'm not saying it's impossible - glad to hear you've successfully implemented it in your workplace. I'm just saying that by-and-large it has the opposite effect to the stated intent.
If most examples of a strategy make things worse, and only one person uses that strategy to improve things, then going around saying "everyone is doing it wrong" rather than questioning the strategy isn't particularly sound.
I've build plenty of (small) client-side rendered UIs myself that lazy-load content; I know the trade-offs and I even believe I can achieve a performant outcome on my own. But that's anecdotal. In the wild, I have not seen a single major website improve perf. via lazy-fetched content rendering.
Re: Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
#150Still 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.
That or banks. Certain major US bank I am using can't function with Origin on.