61–70 of 137 posts
After I started working on my own RSS reader, I started converting more and more website to RSS feeds (e.g. twitter, youtube, all news site) where I only extract interesting bits. It's faster and cleaner, not to mension no ads.
See for instance:
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_...
> We keep things like Adblock Plus at arm's length for plausible deniability - but everyone I know uses it. I wish this had been included in the main body of this post, with some metrics; everyone you know uses it because it makes the web suck so much less. Loading The Verge's article in a Chrome incognito window: 19.6 MB transferred, finished in 41.9 s, huge ad covering the entire page above the developer console I…
Default-deny is the best answer against bloat -- though not for everybody unfortunately, but I did try to make it as straightforward as possible with uBlock Origin[1]. Using default-deny in uBlock Origin/Chromium[2] and with the page displaying properly, I get from Network pane in dev console: - 62 requests - 508 KB transferred Once you start using default-deny mode, it's difficult to go back to anything less restric…
Would you install an extension that, when clicking a link to the verge, it pops up a message that says "this site is considered by the community to be a site that employs intrusive advertising techniques" to remind you not to connect to it at all?
> We keep things like Adblock Plus at arm's length for plausible deniability - but everyone I know uses it. I wish this had been included in the main body of this post, with some metrics; everyone you know uses it because it makes the web suck so much less. Loading The Verge's article in a Chrome incognito window: 19.6 MB transferred, finished in 41.9 s, huge ad covering the entire page above the developer console I…
I've replaced Adblock with uBlock and uMatrix and couldn't be happier. It seems to have a smaller footprint in the browser and better results at filtering away unwanted requests. The only thing that would make this perfect is if they would also run on my Android phone.
Wow. From the article, an example post on the Verge "downloaded 12MB - a little over 7MB in that is JavaScript" and a refresh of the page with things cached still downloaded 8MB again. And key here -- the article HTML content itself was 75k, the rest is ad network Javascript. (apparently over 20 different companies) I don't like tracking scripts either but why can't the ad networks get together and create a shared sc…
Why can't the site just collect some data from the client and forward it to the ad networks on the backend? All of this stuff needs to happen out of band.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder if that is going to be what it takes to fix today's bloat problems: Google takes the hammer to sites that too much advertising cruft. That could get interesting: Google, using the argument that all those ad-related scripts make things slow, ranking sites with a lot of them lower than sites which don't, and at the same time hitting their competitors hard: after all, Google makes money through ads, if their…
nah, that wont work. that would surely end up in legal battle, from the ad agencies saying that Google used their monopolistic power on the search industry just to boost their analytics product.
7MB was about the install size of Microsoft Windows 3.0, a complete (if crummy) OS.
After reading this article, I decided to try reading the verge in a more "limited" browser which doesn't support endless Javascript and too may advanced features: Emacs built in web-browser, or "eww" (that's its name). It's sort of like Lynx or w3m, except you can click things and it shows actual images! You can see it here: http://imgur.com/FqJVB0U You know what? The site and all content loads instantly . It may not…
That’s pretty cool. I’d love to try using a browser like this for a while, but to be honest, I’d probably feel too naked to be browsing the web with no tracking-blocking extensions. No JavaScript makes a huge difference of course, but I doubt that that is good enough to completely prevent all tracking methods advertisers use (I’m thinking of things like third-party elements on a page, although maybe most of those are…
ewww is emacs, so it's all elisp; it'd be easy enough to write your own tracking-blocker. As a first hack, just build a hash table of domains and add a little function which blocks fetching from any domain which is found in the hash table.
Seems reasonable. bwahahaha!
Shall we discuss the number of DNS requests?
And how many of those offsite servers are using something convoluted like Amazon for DNS? (which I find is more and more prevalent thanks to AWS)
The blog author, e.g., is using Amazon for DNS.
Alas, for each and every name, this adds more than a few lookups to what could be a 1-2 request process. Amazon uses multiple levels of indirection.
This dance is not of much consequence in the case of a single name.
But in the aggregate, e.g., many names requested from one overloaded site (such as one author singles out) after another, it does add up.
This also creates a larger margin for errors (failed lookups getting retried and timing out, again and again... while the user sits and waits).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You talk like Apple is doing something new and owns the market.
I haven't seen other mobile browsers support blocking 3rd party content yet. I think that's mainly because Google is the other major phone manufacturer, and their main source of income is that exact 3rd party content. Apple isn't burdened by that - they want to sell phones and keep them the best. Blocking 7 MB of JS that isn't the content the user wants is a good optimization.
Also to be fair you can already block ads on iOS if you jailbreak your phone.