Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Browse the web like its 1999

oldweb.today

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 136 posts

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#111

Post by thejohnconway »

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #97
dmitriid wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit unfair because modern pixel art games are literally nothing like old pixel art games. For one, the resolution has gone from 400x300 to ~3000x1500 and more, and the number of color went from 8 to millions. All those pixels in high-res pixel art have to still be stored somewhere. Even though I still agree that some games do not deserve to be as fat as they are.

At the same time, we're talking about bitmaps here, not 4K textures.

4K textures are bitmaps aren’t they?

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#112

Post by fatnoah »

themodelplumber wrote: post #5

Did anybody here ever use the ISDN data ports in payphones in Japan? I remember seeing them here and there in 1998 (IIRC). At the time I wondered about popping over to one and getting on the web just to see how it would work. ISDN was serious biz to my mind at that time, compared to rural USA dialup.

In 1997 or so, I was an intern in the remote connectivity group at Sun. My job was primarily to help maintain connectivity for the people at home rocking their 128k dual-channel ISDN lines. I helped maintain local modem banks and remotely manage end user hardware and software. I remember drooling at the prospect of such a fat internet pipe.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#113

Post by squarefoot »

rakoo wrote: post #106
squarefoot wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded uBlock Origin, the web is unusable without it. I moved however from NoScript to uMatrix, which can block with more granularity, but needs to be either kept default off or "trained" because its factory settings are very strict and could block a lot of necessary stuff (ie, don't install it to non technical users).

You can replicate NoScript and even uMatrix inside uBlock Origin now (uMatrix is even officially deprecated by uBlock Origin now) uBO gives a lot of flexibility and a traditional "no js" is absolutely possible (see https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/wiki/Blocking-... ). You then select which source is authorized to push crap at your browser

> You can replicate NoScript and even uMatrix inside uBlock Origin now (uMatrix is even officially deprecated by uBlock Origin now)

I ignored this, thanks!

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#114

Post by jmkni »

ricardobayes wrote: post #27
gpmcadam wrote: post #19

"Sorry, OldWeb.today can not run in this emulator in your current browser. Please try the latest version of Chrome or Firefox to use this emulator. " Wow, it really does feel like using an old browser. (Safari Version 15.2 (17612.3.6.1.6))

Arguably, Safari is the IE of our times. Safari somehow always have rendering issues. I use Firefox as that's closest to standards, I hate bending standard code to fit a garbage browser's special needs.

On iOS you have to use Safari if you want to use a content/ad blocker, which means I’m kind of stuck with it on my iPhone/iPad.

Then you bring macOS into play, and the way Safari on mobile syncs with Safari on desktop is really nice. Password sharing in particular is great, so you end up getting sucked in to Safari!

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#115

Post by mikestew »

kragen wrote: post #34
shp0ngle wrote: post #14

This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse . So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do tha…

Dan Luu reports that Google penalizes his pages in search rankings because they don't include enough CSS and JS. It's not really half of the websites; it's the half you're being guided to.

There's a dead comment asking if you have a source, and the commenter appears to have attempted finding it themselves.

As an aside, I vouched for the comment (which still shows as [dead]), because a quick glance at posting history shows just the singular comment as dead, with no indications of twattery to justify it. It's like a commenter with not-interesting post history just got a single comment randomly killed.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#116

Post by majani »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #86
majani wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. This is also happening in gaming, where 2D pixel art platformers are now above 1GB in size https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castlevania-grimoire-of-souls/... When the hardware was restricted, such games used to be squeezed onto a 48MB SNES cartridge

48MB? That's ridiculous for an SNES cart. Even at 48M b that's the size of the largest SNES cart IIRC.

Yes, only a few super ambitious games hit the 48MB max allowed. Most SNES games were under 10MB

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#117

Post by conductr »

shukantpal wrote: post #95
MatmaRex wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It totally is. I used to write custom CSS for IE to make drop shadows work (it didn't support the standard syntax). Now I write custom CSS for Safari to make drop shadows work (there's a bug where if you remove the node, its shadow sometimes stays behind).

And? Single data point.

Everyone else in the world writing CSS has to jump through the same hoops they are referring to... does that really fall under "single data point"?

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#118

Post by jrnichols »

shp0ngle wrote: post #14

This just makes me angry. Browsers are now so fast and capable that you can emulate whole OS with another browser in them, which you can then use to browse . So why does half of the websites in 2021 feel so sluggish? GMail, which was famous for loading fast, sometimes takes forever to load. I need to wait minutes when reading news websites while elements randomly jump around the page (seriously, why does pages do tha…

> But why does the average experience suck so much?

to the current crop of web designers/developers/etc, they literally may not remember a time when the web was a lot faster.

they don't remember the days of websites loading just fine (ok, most of the time..) over a 56k modem. they've grown up with the web the way it is, javascript and all.

that's what I gather, anyway.

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#119

Post by p_l »

hidden-spyder wrote: post #109
p_l wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider typical Medium blog post. If by chance you block certain actions, you'll see it spin ridiculous amount of CPU, trying to sent tracking data all the time over graphql. Some tracking systems injected (often without developer involvement, using so-called tag managers) will send your mouse position and clicks. Through tag managers, you can easily end up loading 50 different scripts, often compiled with attendant…

Any way to stop all those requests?

Well, uBlock Origin and uMatrix worked pretty well for that, but with new Manifest v3 the feature will be lost

Re: Browse the web like its 1999

#120

Post by vikingerik »

SilasX wrote: post #88
majani wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. This is also happening in gaming, where 2D pixel art platformers are now above 1GB in size https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castlevania-grimoire-of-souls/... When the hardware was restricted, such games used to be squeezed onto a 48MB SNES cartridge

Yep. Ticket to Ride is a board game and its video game version on Steam is hundreds of megabytes, yet all it has is 2D images with some scaling and translation effects.

It also has music. I'm not sure how much, but that could account for a couple hundred megabytes if it's many tracks at a fairly high bit rate.
Post reply on HN