The Web We Want
webwewant.mozilla.org
webwewant.mozilla.org
I'm visiting my parents right now. They have what I would term as "rural internet options": satellite, fixed cellular, or dialup. There is no DSL. There is no cable. There is no wifi. Satellite has awful latency and an effective 20GB monthly cap (their advertising is very deceptive because they pool midnight off-peak data in their advertised caps), fixed cellular has a 30GB cap: there is no provision to buy more data on either service short of ruinous overage fees.
Browsing around on the modern web filled with autoplay videos, huge JS libraries, giant pictures, etc. has been sufficient for a 2 person household to blow through that 30GB cap in less than a month. It was hard for me to believe, until I instrumented their network and saw for myself. Of course, accidentally updating any software, accidentally syncing their photo libraries, etc. are all expensive mistakes.
Most effective changes I have been able to make so far (without frustrating the parents too much) have been to ad block and get them to use Opera with Turbo, which has been sufficient to cut their data use by about half. I also put a timer on the cellular hub power supply to manually shut it off when they're not at home or when they're sleeping, because despite best efforts some software still automatically updates.
Another way to mitigate would be to have the browser identify as a tablet/mobile as some websites assume mobile == metered connection. On top of my head, there is some addon like this in Chrome.
I'm loving the big improvement so far. Plus many sites seem to be loading faster now.
Interesting, had the same experience this month, though on my mobile phone's post-paid data plan. Actually in earlier months too, but those were near the middle or end of the month. This time it happened within 5 days of the start of my billing cycle.
You in India? Asking because Fair Use Policy (also has another cynical/realistic expansion given by users) is a term used by Indian ISPs (though could be other places too of course).
My phone ISP nags me too. After I buy a booster pack (see nearby comment by me) because the main one got over early, I get unwanted calls from them selling more offers. Have to tell them I'm not interested.
http://superuser.com/questions/1085654/how-to-minimize-unwan...
[1] The NetBalancer software seems to be helping with the issue.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of these ISP issues of excessive bandwidth usage are intentional.
Where in the world did you have the issues you describe, if not private?
Your webapp runs great on a laptop in the middle of SF, but not on my crappy phone in the middle of Nowheres-ville.
Case in point: Wisconsin has about as many people as Norway, but Wisconsin is around three times smaller in area and has a much simpler topology and topography. Still, Norway has a lower number of households where broadband is unavailable.
I haven't tried it yet, but I think that the Apple Lightning to HDMI adaptor will work to get Amazon Video on the TV. I would think that HDMI would be even cheaper/easier on an Android device.
While some tools are available to reduce tracking and other MS privacy-invading practices, auto-updating remains a curse that's hard to counter.
Obviously this is not a fault of the web itself, but an example of the ways vendors use the internet in opposition to interests of users. It's unclear how these abusive practices can be curbed, but I'm all for Mozilla and other organizations trying to do something about it.
A happy discovery: marking a particular wi-fi network as 'metered' (the obvious thing to do, right?) will prevent automatic downloads of updates over that network.
I'm assuming having to check manually for updates but that's not a big burden. Hopefully no inadvertent "side-effects" from running as a metered connection.
FB Pages now have a giant login thing that takes over the entire page if you aren't logged in. If you close it, it comes back for every other page you visit.
The amount of stuff that uBlock origin blocks now is amazing. I couldn't even use WSJ until I turned on ad blocking.
I'm starting to think text based browsing is the future. Using chat like interface along with voice commands, mainly work directly with APIs and just never use a browser again. HTML and JavaScript are being taken over by crap on sites.
The web is starting to feel like a garbage dump. API's are the only logical path forward I can see.
I dream of a world in which the typical worker's wages hadn't been suppressed and decoupled from productivity for the last four decades, and people had the disposable income to work less and write and make art more, and give it away instead of tryin' to get us all to punch the monkey and win. I dream of a world in which we can ALL punch the monkey and win! Well, ok, maybe not, but still...
I say better financial education, and then the next step.
In nature, getting between a mother and her baby is perhaps one of the most dangerous situations you can be in. very few predators, unless they are out of options, consider humans a viable meal. But even ruminants will potentially attack you to defend their young.
Trying to treat humans as cold calculators of utility is perhaps the worst idea economists have clung to over the years.
If you downvoted the parent of this comment and would like to help me do better in future, I'm all ears...
My high school had a financial literacy requirement, but it was a half year class taught by one of the worst teachers I've had (very nice lady but like the computer teacher they were just riding out to retirement and relegated to these classes that were undersupplied and they weren't knowledgeable in), the content was out of date, and sparse. They cover things like writing checks, bank account creation, but I remember nothing covering how loans work or anything of that nature because the math required would make the class too tough for general education. The class was really something the school just paid lip service to as the state required it. It's a damn shame school's don't have better experiences because people enter the world totally unequipped for the financial predators that loom.
Loans (interest, and also contracts in general) are not required to be presented at a level that /most/ of the population can understand. There is a giant, thick, legal language contract that even if you are a lawyer you probably don't really understand (it hasn't been adjudicated, so you don't know what a judge feels it says).
Disclosure: I do use credit cards, but only as a convenient and insurance providing mechanism for accessing my bank account and recouping some of the fees built in to prices by the predatory banking industry.
Two of the three would be the death knell for our economy, whereas the third is politically unpalatable.
I don't think it's enough, though, when you're trying to stretch a $230 paycheck to $300 in expenses.
I don't think it's enough, either, when you look at how poor people get dinged with so many more fees than the less-poor whenever they go out to do anything in the world.
And I don't think most of the "save what you can" advice is particularly meaningful when you're telling people to put aside $10 a month. One big family gathering could wipe out a year's savings on food costs alone!
I think the first solution has to be getting people--especially the poorest--paid more for the incredibly taxing work poor people tend to do, like cleaning, cooking, all those jobs where you're on your feet 8, 10, 12 hours a day and your body's worn out by the time you're 40.
Oh and the decline of unions meant that workers lost their ability to successfully lobby their government, business meanwhile increased their lobby efforts.
So, I see the root causes as a rigged game against workers. (Rigged as the odds slightly against our favour, so we get just enough wins and benefits as to not realize that we are loosing overall).
Take 2 different scenarios:
1) Youth gets paid $4/hr (well below the minimum wage) to work in their chosen field as an apprenticeship. Graduates with a certification in their field with a little bit of money saved up, no debt, and real work experience.
2) Youth gets into massive student loan debt, gets a degree but has no real job experience or employment prospects. Has to work the next decade to pay off their student loans.
The one that makes the most sense and that would result in people being better off is illegal.
Though in general, I think there is an obvious trend in markets - if the people are rich, you reinvest money into new products or into improving your existing products so you can sell more stuff. When the people are poor, you use psychologically targeted advertising to make people buy things they cannot afford and sit on vast cash reserves because fundamental to capitalism is that markets respond to the needs of capital, but when you have incredible wealth inequality the only demand of capital is making more capital, and sitting on money becomes more profitable to shareholders than taking risks trying to get the drippings out of an already empty pot of middle class wealth.
Simply put, my favorite metric of whether an economy is fair is how large an advertising budget the economy as a whole has. The larger it is, the less fair the market is, and the more unequal the wealth distribution is, and every society should aspire to be one where nobody needs to advertise because all your reinvestment can go into making more, better stuff rather than trying to manipulate people in buying your stuff over someone elses stuff. The more valuable advertising is the poorer your country is.
If anyone is interested, I recommend reading up on socialist theory. If you like markets mutualism, market socialism, or collectivism may be interesting to you. If you think planning might be a better route for the 21st century check out syndicalism or communism. There's a number of other philosophies I'm not acquainted with. Also, inb4 "communism/socialism is big government and authoritarianism", I'm tired of explaining the failings of tankies.
There hasn't been any evidence yet that central planning is effective in the long run. What do you think will work this time around?
Central planning and command economies work really well inside corporations, such as Apple or Google. They don't make internal decisions by hosting mini-markets and pitting their workers against each other, they have departments who study demographics and departments that study research and logistics and so on.
Tankies claiming the fall of communism is just around the corner are in the same bucket of "bad" as free market libertarians who adore corporations.
That's because they can fire anyone that works for the company who doesn't agree with the goals. Do you propose to jail or disappear people that disagree and work against the direction defined by the central plan?
Again though, I'm not here to talk about the failings of autocratic state planning advocated by tankies.
Managing static resources is easy.
Now, cooperatives are interesting. They mostly don't work, but when they work, they are great.
That said, while most people seem to barely know about his writings in Capital Volume 1, Volume 2 and 3, published by Engels after Marx death, went on to point out that while there was a struggle between the factory owning capitalists and their workers. There was also a struggle going on between production capitalists and finance capitalists. And that the ultimate culprit of capitalism was likely to be finance.
IIRC, Marx even noted that in the long run it would likely be better for production capital to ally themselves with the workers against finance. But that production capital was more likely to squeeze the workers as they themselves got squeezed by finance (with landlords and other rent seekers lumped into finance).
What we call "capitalism" is a perverted incarnation with low interest rates and extremely high monetary inflation. This eliminates the ability to save for the lower class, and pushes in the middle class into wall street's fake "investments" where they can be scavenged by management fees, insider gaming, and bubbles caused by the surplus of dumb money.
Despite what the inflation acolytes preach, prices should be downward trending because price is the primary metric that an economy optimizes for! Gains in productivity should be directly reflected in the price of goods (eg computer technology, which has been advancing strong enough to resist the forced inflation). Instead, these gains are inflated out of sight and the corresponding new money is distributed to the gatekeepers of monetary creation.
In a functioning economy, workers should be able to gradually save some surplus, decreasing their reliance on weekly income, and giving them more bargaining power. This should cause wages to rise, creating a feedback cycle where workers demand to work ever less (as their marginal utility per extra dollar drops).
Instead, extremely low interest rates create a zero-sum treadmill for any modern necessity that can be financialized (eg housing, healthcare, cars, education), leaving us to compete against one another for minute changes in standing while the banksters collect the surplus as rent.
Then again, perhaps my argument is just a no true Scotsman similar to the ones defending communism, and any fiat capitalistic system will eventually succumb to itself and centralize in this manner (deprecate wealth in favor of income).
What I do definitely know is we're not going to get there by demanding top-down change, because the top retains power for itself regardless of what paradigm it promises. We must secure our freedom through technological means and build a better system from the ground up.
The point about organizing from the bottom up is spot on. I believe many of socialism failings were because of attempts to organize top down and not allowing people to manage themselves. This is why I'm particular to anarchism, as the focus is on creating freely associated communities that come together so power comes from the bottom up and there are no concrete hierarchies. Many also have abandoned the idea of some great revolution to topple the system and instead opt for building structures like co-ops, mutual banks, neighborhood assemblies, community gardens, and charities in hope of building a new society in the shell of the current one.
The goals of society at large should be reached through agreement.
These goals might be reflected in decreased costs (or even funding) for desired activities and 'taxes' on undesired or activities that should be limited; or maybe through another agreed means.
Individuals, and possibly small groups of individuals, should then be free to choose their own means and methods for realizing those goals (or abstain from that process).
In that case the solution is not communism, the solution is compensating people with stocks or other forms of equity.
less than 1% of the population make minimum wage. Most companies, even the big ones you hate, pay well above minimum wage. For instance, All of the fast food places in my area pay $10.15/hour starting. The minimum wage is a few dollars less than this. The free market has pushed the wages higher, because nobody will work for less than this.
"I dream of a world in which the typical worker's wages hadn't been suppressed and decoupled from productivity for the last four decades"
It hasn't been suppressed or decoupled. If you have essentially have the skills that a high school student can perform at 30 years old, you aren't going to get paid enough to have a house, 2 kids, and a car. I see nothing wrong with this. If anything, the wages in the past were artificially inflated. Especially when you factor in unions.
We also are now competing globally. The beloved Internet has also created an environment where we need to compete with someone overseas making much less.
It has many parallels to file sharing over the last decade: musicians and artists now have to compete with the filing sharing sites because of the Internet and this same paradigm shift has now moved to other industries and jobs. The only difference is that I don't see people here on HN crying out to give the artists money through government intervention. Quite the contrary.
"and give it away instead of tryin' to get us all to punch the monkey and win"
I don't really see a problem with so many people trying to make money online. Money has fueled pretty much every technology breakthrough in the last 50 years.
Money also gives you power..over your own life and your own decisions. I started my own business online 5 years ago. I can schedule my own vacations and I don't need to answer to a boss. This is true freedom. I also contribute to many open source projects. When I was working for a living, I contributed nothing.
Your 'dream' would mean that most things online were free, ruining the ability for the independent artist to actually make a living with what they love. The end result would actually mean less freedom because our only choices would be working for the government or a large corporation.
The need for money will not go away any time soon and the person with the money makes the rules.
What we need is more educated people (so they don't have to work terrible jobs for little pay) and more people starting businesses and making money doing what they truly love (creating a more independent society).
I don't think so. Not according to this[1]. Besides, close to minimum wage is hardly live-able.
[1] http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-characteristics-mini...
Isn't it ...copyright infringement? Sigh... DRM are incoming...
Unfortunately, it won't do much to decrease Javascript abuse, unless NoScript becomes some kind of a default.
It is on my systems. The OOOOP's web - that's the one that I experience every single day.
You should try Brave if you haven't already.
Times Square is what you get when you try to clean something up and it becomes commercialized. A lot of it has to do with the incentives put in place to clean it up. Tax brakes are generally provided for companies to utilize the space, and "clean it up". Even Lincoln Center is an example of this sort. The money provided to develop Lincoln Center was supposed to be utilized to improve that area, but instead it pushed out all the residents. It did not improve their lives. They can't afford events at Lincoln Center. They were relocated.
In both cases, Times Square and Lincoln Center, the communities that were utilizing the space prior to redevelopment / improvement were simply displaced. The redevelopment did not benefit these constituents. These constituents did not have the influence needed to either send help their way or steer changes that would affect them.
So really, the incentives are directed by the political mechanism, which is directed by the interest groups with the requisite influence.
Companies and affluent individuals.
This should look very familiar.
Many of the most visible parts of the Internet today (I guess the press recently decided that the "Internet" should no longer be capitalized, but they are wrong) might fairly be viewed as our shared digital Times Square. It looks like a public space, but in actuality it is a heavily regulated private space.
If, on the other hand, you are a New Yorker, you don't go there. You go to the many other amazing pockets of humanity and creativity that the city has to offer. And they're constantly changing. One week a space smells like urine and you wouldn't go down their after dark even if it was 4:30 am and had the only street meat in sight; the next week your buddy gives you the heads up that it's now an awesome bar, just make sure and use the door in the connected building because there are no signs or working doors at the front yet. And then, in a year, that bar turns into a Gristedes.
My point, long winded though it might be, is that sure parts of the Internet are being co-opted and grossly commercialized, but a true local explores beyond these parts and makes a home amongst these parts. Going native means knowing where the alleyways and speakeasies are. It means having your ear to the ground and finding out about the newest restaurants by word of mouth instead of paid advertisements. In a word, taste. Acquiring and exercising good taste in the places your frequent, you patronize, you invest in, you wander in, will both benefit you and the community you are a part of.
One last point. One advantage that the Internet has over our share physical spaces is that distance is, practically speaking, a non-issue. In our shared physical space it takes a good while to walk from Times Square to Lincoln Center. But, to go from the web presence of Times Square to Lincoln Center takes no time at all. Heck, you can have both tabs up on your screen at the same time. So, sure, parts of the Internet can be co-opted and ruined. But there is space enough for us to recreate. And if others want to come along, we'll always be a click away.
I'm sick of being told that I can only think and live in some antiquated way because some people in the 1960s and 1970s thought it was a good idea.
Physical space -- or "geography" and the community defined by it, is not some "antiquated idea".
And just because one can have friends (or "friends") all over the world through the internet and modern communications, doesn't mean that where one lives is not important, and they should not care of it and try to improve it -- and yes, connect with nearby people.
If you slip and break your ankle on the pavement, or your house catches fire, it's those "antiquated physical neighbors" that will come to the rescue. Or not -- if they too consider the whole "community by geography" notion antiquated, they wont.
"Community by geography" is just another term for the place we live and the people in it. One might not care for most of them, by its sad to not care of any of them, and also sad not to care for the place. It's also a recipe for a decayed urban civilization, fewer local opportunities, and a derelict neighborhood.
Ever as I gain more experience with 1s and 0s, I find a greater appreciate for and a greater draw to my front porch.
Without going into neuroscience, physics, chaos theory, and what not, by acknowledging and embracing that I am human and not some abstract distributed, computing network, and by accepting the consequences of that, my life grows richer.
In this context, what I really mean is that a space should not be controlled entirely by the people who just happen to be there at the moment. Every space has a past. Every space has a future. The past and the future are always different from the present. That's as it should be. People who think in terms of "I control this space now, so all things should be about me" are thinking in a prehistoric mode I find distasteful.
Like, imagine if suddenly the fishing community decided to come en masse to HN and start talking and upvoting only fishing-related stories, while downvoting / flagging everything else. I think the present HN community should have the (moral) right to tell them to go and find their own spot, instead of taking over someone else's.
For an example, look at what that desire has done to the housing market of San Francisco.
In the case of Times Square, the "communities" that were "utilizing" the space before were three-card-monte scammers, porn theaters, and drug dealers. Not all change is bad.
As a side project I am starting to work on a non-HTTP browser (and non-websocket, non-webrtc, etc). The first "protocol" will be IPFS. Download all of the HTML/JS/images and store all the cookies/localStorage you want, you can't send the information back to any server. Heck, you can't even know you have a page view. Now to make it more powerful, I will offer a JS API to pages that let's them use the mutation features of IPFS, but it is strictly opt-in and the permissions are very narrow and clear to the user (think specific oauth scopes).
Is it that common for trackers to have Websocket/WebRTC as a requirement? Pretty much any trackers I see in the wild is using regular Ajax calls. And if you're a tracking service, it's not exactly hard to fallback to Ajax if Websockets aren't available...
EDIT: My mistake, I misread the first mention of HTTP as HTML.
No, you can be fingerprinted and what not, but being tracked requires you send the data somewhere.
That's not really tracking per se any more than any local stateful data is.
> optionally with server-side checking of referrers and URL parameters
Again, no, this requires sending data to the server (in the URL or as HTTP headers in this case) which is exactly what I am saying would NOT happen in my project.
How do you request data from a server without making any contact with the server? The initial page request is sending data to the server. That is unavoidable.
A web browser sends (or doesn't send) lots of HTTP headers all the time. The particular headers sent (User-Agent, Referer[sic], Accept, etc.) or not sent are additional data that can be used to fingerprint, and thus track you (not to mention your request IP address).
I specifically mentioned IPFS
> The initial page request is sending data to the server. That is unavoidable.
Wrong. I specifically mentioned IPFS and would introduce storj, sia, maidsafe, etc as deemed worthy.
> A web browser sends (or doesn't send) lots of HTTP headers all the time.
Not the one I'm talking about. HTTP isn't even in the picture. Please please read my post that mentions non-HTTP.
0 - https://github.com/cretz/shrewd 1 - https://github.com/cretz/safe-poc-browser
---
1. rich countries don't care about freedom
2. countries that are quickly industrializing value opportunity
3. privacy is valued by everyone - but especially wealthy European nations
4. privacy is least valued by countries in war / unrest
--
However, the message between the lines it seems that everyone is basically saying FREEDOM but within the context of their political realities.
In North America we're worried about our adult content habits becoming public, or our extramarital affairs, or our secret bank accounts. So hence _privacy_ most reflects this political reality.
In Turkey _freedom_ and _privacy_ are both ~25%. This reflects a developed society which is experiencing increased controls on internet (and IRL) freedoms.
Par contre, countries like Iraq / Egypt / Bangladesh, _opportunity_ and _accessibility_ are the most important, reflecting that what the population cares most about is economic progress rather than press freedoms.
Malaysia is interesting; they top the list at 31% wanting freedom, yet, there has been little news (that I heard) about political reform/unrest.
All these responses reflect different freedoms that people are seeking -- contextualized by their political reality. If you lack humans freedoms, like freedom of speech, the type, of freedom you seek is best described _freedom_. While _opportunity_ and _access_ best describe economic and knowledge freedoms. Freedom to do whatever you want without fear of public exposure damaging marriages, job prospects, is best described by _privacy_
[edit - added clarity] --
Disclaimer: The above are based on observation and not statistical analysis. If you can download the raw data please let me know.
I chose user control. What does that tell about me or my country?
What kind of Web do you want?
+ Promotes freedom
+ Inspires learning
+ Safeguards privacy
+ Is available to all
+ Creates opportunity
+ Puts me in control
Sidenote: let's address the "enable JS" issue once and for all since it keeps popping up in these threads.
Imagine an alternate history where a book reading program went critical (we'll call it "Reader") and took over the world. (In the actual world of course it was a static document consumer -- the "Browser" -- that took over everything and eventually became its own operating system).
In this alternate history there are regular internet fights (occurring in Reader of course) over whether turning off ReaderScript in Reader is a reasonable thing to do.
One side says: it's dumb to turn off the programming language in your Reader and still expect it to function -- programming graceful degradation into every reader app in the world would cost billions of dollars and be a huge waste.
The other side says: that's true, but I just want to read the Quran without popups!
Happily synthesis is easy since both sides are right. You should never expect a readerapp to work without ReaderScript. You should always be able to expect a book to work without RS -- they should never have had access to it in the first place.
The path forward is clear. Readers should have clearly different modes for books (documents/sites in our world) and apps. We should maintain a community list of which URLs are which, and load that by default into Reader. This way apps can continue to run programs by default, but we don't get popups in our books.
JS should be reserved for heavy interactive applications. Not pages that amount to viewing a document.
There's no reason why this page couldn't work without JavaScript. It's a poll and a display of the results.
Sure, enhance it with JavaScript: that's great, and it's cool, and it's useful. But don't force people to execute code when all they really need to do is POST a form and then GET a page.
People who do this are wrong.
Your position is ridiculous. HTML5 was designed in part to make it easier to create applications that run in your browser. So yes some people will be writing applications that run in your browser. It's like expecting flash sites to work when you don't have flash turned on. Either be happy with your choice or turn it back on. Don't expect the rest of the world to cater to your fringe browser settings.
Search engines typically don't run JavaScript, so relying on it can be bad for SEO, and in some cases accessibility.
Considering iOS devices don't support Flash, and popularity for Flash is waning, I think it's even worse to suggest a website should cater only to those who can run Flash.
Web pages should use JS only when necessary to enhance the user experience.
Web applications can go hog wild and load 10MB of JS libs.
The problem is that hosts have too much control over client's experience. Frankly, most of the works designers today do on the web is work that should not be done - 90% of websites would be infinitely better if they only sent text with lightweight semantic annotations and a list of available actions. The user should be able to explore the data in whatever way they please, and not be shoehorned into a single prescribed way of interaction.
That said, your point on incentives is spot-on. People making money on the web benefit from any marginal increase of control they can get - so the whole thing turns into a typical race to the bottom. And then, they also can (and do) use their money to influence the development of web technologies to make it easier for them to make more money. This process sadly isn't any different than regulations being influenced by businesses to benefit them instead of society.
Is there a solution? I don't know. Most people don't even realize how much of their own time and potential they waste by accepting the "status quo". I hope someone eventually develops a browser with sole purpose of unfucking the Internet. Some kind of a cross between links, Emacs and the Reader Mode from Firefox.
Not really. Nobody is expecting JS code to work without a JS interpreter being available/enabled. Instead, they're expecting a page of text + images to work without any JS code being required.
In your analogy, nobody expects Flash objects to work without Flash. Everybody expects text + images to work without Flash objects being required.
<html> <body> <form method="post" action="https://webwewant.mozilla.org/share/"> <ul> <li><label><input name="issue" value="access" type="radio"/> Is available to all</label></li> <li><label><input name="issue" value="freedom" type="radio"/> Promotes freedom</label></li> <li><label><input name="issue" value="control" type="radio"/> Puts me in control</li> <li><label><input name="issue" value="opportunity" type="radio"/> Creates opportunity</label></li> <li><label><input name="issue" value="learning" type="radio"/> Inspires learning</label></li> <li><label><input name="issue" value="privacy" type="radio"/> Safeguards privacy</label></li> <li><label><input name="issue" value="nojs" type="radio"/> Works without javascript</label></li> </ul> <input type="submit" value="Submit"/> </form> </body> </html>
Apparently this is an unpopular notion. There's an entire protocol that's based on links between plain content - use it! The non-javascript users on the WWW are such a tiny minority that nobody who pays developers is going to bother with the time. The average user wants the extra functionality that even basic JS can provide - demanding that the web be supported without it is akin to demanding support for IE4 on Mac Classic.
That is the reality, folks. You don't have to like it, but you should accept it.
The content of most sites created today could reasonably been hosted on sites when IE4 for Mac Classic was current, text, pictures, form fields & buttons. You don't have to prove it but you should build such a site today using methods that would likely mean someone using IE4 for Mac Classic would have some access to the content, albeit not an optimal experience.
And uglier, and limited. While the people here might not have any problem with the entire web looking like Ward Cunningham's wiki, I doubt the public at large feels the same...
http://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/
See also: Almost any other local newspaper website, from anywhere in the world.
(And if they complain that things are worse than they were, they often misattribute them anyway. My mother blames a lot of things on her computer being too slow, even though half of them aren't really the fault of the computer, but of the lazy-ass companies putting increasingly bloated shit on-line.)
With proper caching and today's connectivity it's far less of an issue.
AJAX-y still is nicer and definitely has its place but at least speaking for myself if I'm reading a blog or a news site I'd prefer a fast static page rather than a lot of gratuitious ajax animations and transitions.
Considering the sizes of the javascript libraries loaded by all of the websites, I find it unlikely that the page size for a static page will be larger.
The average size of a single page is larger than a doom install now. That's not because of orders of magnitude more of HTML. It's because of the 15 different tracking JS libs, analytics libs, effects libs, etc that are piled into every site.
99% of the Web is shit.
Also, most people have no clue about how websites work, and so they can't really imagine how they could look like. Moreover, most people accept whatever market throws at them, because they don't have any other choice anyway.
http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
or this:
http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/
But documents like these aren't commonplace[0]. JS isn't used to enhance documents, it's used to make them much worse - because that degrading of quality and experience is how websites make money.
Apps are obviously a different beast. Most of websites don't need to be or behave like apps though.
[0] - which is a very sad thing; it's exactly the kind of advantage computers have over paper, and it's not being used at all. You either get dumb text that's even less functional than a book (think of articles rendered to image), or wasteful apps with shit-ton of ads and tracking.
But if the user doesn't have JavaScript, they should still be able to navigate the site the old-fashioned way. It doesn't have to be one way or the other.
There should almost always be fallbacks for people who don't have JavaScript, but if you are going to use JavaScript, it would at least help if any nontrivial code were free, such that it isn't blocked by the LibreJS add-on.
At the very least, the user experience with JavaScript enabled should not be worse than with JavaScript disabled.
The only way to fix it JS-level is to bake a requirement into the standard that the code size limit for JS is 256kb. If a company can't fit their "value-added features" in it, that's their problem.
My browser use is not much different than on Web 1.0 days, except when I cannot install a specific native application.
Plus, there is such a thing as ROI.
JS is like HTML and CSS, core part of today's web.
My understanding is that javascript is a part of the web today, and everything around it makes it easier to run javascript applications in your browser, making websites more powerful. I personally love this and a lot of website I browse would be worse without javascript (google docs, calendar, etc.), so I have trouble understanding what is wrong with javascript running.
Also, since now most apps are complete javascript apps (and not only some DOM manipulation), it seems a lost cause to try to get website optionally "extend" their experience with javascript. That would mostly just imply to re-built most of the page for when javascript is disabled.
I also had in the past legally blind co-workers that could barely use a browser, so they had their own problems with JavaScript overriding defaults.
By the look of it: if JavaScript proponents designed car doors, there would only be remote unlocking and no physical key.
It's just bad engineering lately beign promoted as 'the default way to build webpages'.
If I start my browser with JS enabled, it takes a few days and Firefox is at 100% CPU continuously, making my laptop battery last 2 instead of 5 hours, and if you start a packet sniffer, you see how all kinds of tabs are constantly reporting back to their mothership what I am doing.
That is why I keep JS disabled.
Also, most things that can be improved in websites (not to be confused with web apps) with JS would be better implemented as browser functionality.
First, I was confused by the animation of green dots on completing the poll question. I had expected that each dot would light up in a color associated with the selected poll answer for the associated user, and thought something must be wrong that I was only seeing the folks who had chosen "Freedom".
Second, once I figured out to hit the color legend to see different results, the contrast between some of the brighter highlight colors on the map and the blue background made it nearly impossible to visually distinguish the gradients.
Mozilla is certainly treating the cookie management dialog box, which has been broken for years, as optional. Same with accepting Mike Perry's patches and various other examples.
If Mozilla could actually do better in terms of privacy and security features than a handful of Tor Browser Bundle devs, they wouldn't need efforts like this and their work would speak for itself. I still use Mozilla code every day and am grateful for their work, but this sort of rhetoric is unimpressive.
1) One that isn't completely dominated by advertising.
2) One that isn't dominated by proprietary software, that encourages users to participate in FOSS.
3) One focused on data. Part of the problem of javascript, so uneeded in most cases.
4) More on javascript, how about one where each page doesn't load 30 scripts from alternate domains? Even the major new sites do this, and it makes me hate them.
5) One where ISP's don't hand over browsing information to anyone with a dollar or a badge without a warrant.
6) One where VPN's and other privacy centered providers learn how to build systems that don't keep logs and are built with privacy as a first class citizen.
7) Not last, and certainly not least, I mostly want a web that encourages and grows the freedom of thought, speech, and discussion that is and was such a fundamental part of the origins of the internet in the first place. It seems increasingly marginalized on the modern web. The beauty of communications mediums is the power it gives the formerly powerless, but I think the oligarchy has recognized this threat and this is why the internet is going to be increasingly a target of bad legislation written by corrupt "representatives". Beware cries of hate speech or any other attempts at censoring "for the greater good".
Just a few of things I want in web off the top of my head. As for this Mozilla page, I think if we think about the four freedoms and fundamental principles behind them, user control really has to be the starting point. You can't have privacy if the user can't turn off spywidgetX. You can't have freedom if the user can't Y.
Once again, I feel like one day, if we don't destroy ourselves as a species, we will look back and wonder why it took people so long to understand why RMS is and was right. The four freedoms are fundamental to the web I want, and while I often get a lot of hate on HN for being so pro RMS/GPL, I think if more people took the time to understand the issues they would tend to agree.
edit: One where strong theoretical and practical encryption is for everyone, and isn't vilified by the government.
(I didn't downvote, though. I just think it's strange to expect universal agreement with Javascript Luddism among hackers.)
[Out of subject] I'm curious how many nuclear and coal plants are required for web browsing related tasks today ...
A) One with babies
B) One with rainbows
C) One with good meals
D) One with friends and fun
E) One with novelty and adventure
F) One that makes us smarter, faster, and more beautiful
edit: to be clear, what I'm trying to say is that this is far less a survey than a vapid corporate ejaculation. I don't understand how Mozilla's culture ended up like this. Was it always like this?
How about a list of features instead?
Here are some things I'd like to see:
- prevent videos from auto playing / making sound
- prevent sites from forcing me to turn off AdBlock
- sleep mode for tabs (sometimes I leave tabs open that I mean to read later) but they still take up a lot of resources even if I don't open that tab for weeks.
- readable mode (I don't want to see animations right next to the article I'm trying to read). It's extremely distracting. Maybe a pause mode (where the entire page is - stop changing where the text is on the page as I read it (as pages load, as ads show up / disappear).
- Scrolling should be linear. I shouldn't scroll down and see the text move in the opposite direction because some header disappears from the top of the page, this shifting the text up higher).
- Raise the simultaneous download limit and/or allow a large number of them to be queued without me having to wait until a slot frees up to make sure that file is going to be downloaded.
- Make it easier to kill distracting elements on a page with a single click.
- Anything that allows me to be able to develop for a single platform (the web) instead of having to deal with native app development, app store restrictions, and another company taking a huge chunk out of sales.It's like wanting my Android and Mac applications to work without code too, like wanting my entire operating system to just handle PDF files and maybe have a functional text editor. It's like whatever state computers were in 1999, that's what is desired. Are we on Hacker News? A technology news site? People here don't want to use technology and see it evolve and progress?
The vast majority of js does not seem to provide me with any benefit.
At least maps.google.com let's you know, "When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page. Enable JavaScript to see Google Maps."
Instagram is just a blank white page.
No amount of content is a worthy exchange for you butt-fucking my browser, my computer, and my life.
As engineers, developers, and designers, there is a mantra of designing software to "fail gracefully". This means that even if a user doesn't have Javascript enabled, a site will still function in a usable manner.
It also means that Web developers should not be including every JS library they can just to save from typing (or fast iteration out the door), when the result is a laggy page that takes forever to load, scrolls 5 seconds after moving the mouse wheel, and requires a computer built within the last 3 years. That is not efficient, and not the best experience you can give for your users, nor the best way to develop for them.
People here want to use technology and see it evolve. But in this case of evolution, the bogged down Web pages are slow, fat gazelles that will probably not have a long enough life to produce.
Do you run every binary file sent to your email? I don't, as I don't trust the criminals that sends malware through email. I do run binaries sent through email if I trust it, like if it is cryptographic signed by someone I trust.
I would predict in a renewed trust in JavaScript if the language got limited, similar to the filters that exist in noscript, TBB, privoxy and other similar projects. No cross-site calls, no rewriting of links, no loading of tracking images and so on. The technology that prevents malware need to evolve and progress, or the result is that people will simply stop using new technology where the risk of being attacked is high.
The web browser is a hypertext reader. When you go to a text content site, there is nothing wrong with expecting it to work without JavaScript.
It's not.
Javascript developers have done more to erode privacy, openness, and trust on the Web than anyone else.
Why would I, a reasonably savvy aerospace engineer who doesn't even know all the dirty little tracking tricks, even consider for one second enabling js by default?
At best I am "just" increasing some scumbag advertiser's profit. At worst I am going to catch something nasty.
This is like saying developers of MS Windows applications are responsible for the horrible period of Windows worms we had a decade or so ago before MS started to get more serious about security.
I think you have this backwards, sorry. Perhaps it used to be true?
We have reached a tipping point where using a JavaScript blocker like NoScript actually improves the browsing experience. And not just a little bit, I mean substantially. The NoScript UX is good, and I can easily toggle domains on/off. I very seldom have to enable JS for a new site and my list of permanently white-listed sites is relatively small, maybe 20 or so.
To anyone who still thinks that JavaScript makes your browsing experience better, try browsing without it again. The shitstorm of clutter and annoyance that people keep complaining about is now the worse option. No one is hijacking my scroll, no modals are blocking the page content, pages load lightning fast, it's great! For a select few sites that can be trusted to run JavaScript to improve my experience, they get white-listed and work well too. It's my browser, running code I decide to approve, and the overall experience is very good.
Yes, probably, but don't forget that those are the people who probably liked privacy-related Facebook pages and don't necessarily represent the opinion of an average Facebook user.
Privacy should be an added value, not something we put in front of everything else. It would be meaningless if web wouldn't enable us to do what we do. So in reality, isn't this poll just a list of things we already have thanks to the internet, plus one thing we don't have - privacy?
& I avoid using the services I do not trust.
In other words, privacy comes before everything else because it underpins everything else. Remove it, and the other values are all either illusory, or their non-illusory status is transient at best.
I would like to see strong privacy controls protected by the same strong force of law that media companies have with DMCA, etc. Citizen's interests should be protected at a higher level than corporation's interests.
I would also like a better mechanism for controlling how much extra media a server sends the browser. Browsing with Lynx (text based) is an option, but not so nice.
The web i want is a web with a Mozilla which does not care for Google at all and puts them and their shady actions and browser development concept on ignore.
(BTW you folks who downvote me for complaining about sites that fail without JS, what gives? What's your idea here? I can't use the web without JS? I'm the idiot? No. I don't agree. Make your site do something reasonable without JS or you're the idiot. C'mon.)
I know that if I want to make a simple web app, it's easier for me to write it in JavaScript, throw it on GitHub Pages, and have free static hosting for it. Much better for me that having to run a server with PHP or Node or Django or whatnot.
I don't miss a web that didn't have JavaScript. There's a lot we can do now that we couldn't then... say, like navigating pages without constant page reloads.
How would "The Web We Want" map even work if it were server-side only? Certainly it would be a very different experience, requiring Mozilla to code it twice. I suppose it is up to the developer to judge whether the cost is worth the benefit (0.25-2% of users)
HTML and CSS are crap. People are forced to use javascript even for the simplest things not because they want but because have to. Javascript itself is not much better but at the very least it prevents this frankenstein monster from falling apart.
You are the idiot because you're asking for the impossible.
I mean, honestly - this website is a simple poll with results in the form of (imprecise geographical coordinates, voting choice). It would be about 100x better if served in this form:
| Country | Availability | Freedom | Opportunity | Control | Learning | Privacy |
|-----------------+--------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------|
| *NORTH AMERICA* | aggregate % | aggregate % | aggregate % | aggregate % | aggregate % | aggregate % |
| ... | specific % | specific % | specific % | specific % | specific % | specific % |
| ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
| *EUROPE* | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
| ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
I mean, I get it. This page is just an ad. It needs to look nice. But it bothers me when sites that are supposed to be useful are being designed as art forms.
People don't care about much else. It's the killer apps, not the freedom that people are buying. People trade freedom for shiny things because it makes them feel good.
It seems like a small/unimportant thing but it's sooo annoying...
It doesn't matter how great your Manifesto is (and what kind of web you want), if things like this prevent people from using your product.
What's with all the little dots fading in and out?
Proceeds to turn us into literal data 'points'.
Cutting off that clause really changes the intended meaning.
* Brave has built in no-script support, and NoScript is a top add-on for other browsers.
* WebAssembly.
You're welcome! :-P
Let's start there first.
Oh wait we did a step in that direction with WebSQL until mozilla killed it out of not invented here syndrome.
Edit: A better discussion of what the quirks are, so you don't have to just take their word for it. https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memor...
I also see the lack of alternative implementations as a plus. SQLite is as portable as C essentially. So it's the only Web standard that's not broken and different in subtle ways across browsers.
If you look through old mail and irc archives you'll also find that somebody actually offered to specify a websql sqlite independent of sqlite under the condition that mozilla will assure that they will implement it. Which didn't happen.
I don't think compatibility between browsers is very prominent in the minds of browser vendors tbh, considering how many browsers fail to implement specifications correctly.
I think it's pretty clear why people opposed SQL. All this happened in the midst of the NoSQL hype. Where everybody was bashing SQL in favour of key Value stores and document databases (which turned out to have far more constraints than people assumed) (I made the same mistake back then). And especially Web developers have a tendency to go for the newest shiniest of trends (bazillion Web frameworks anyone).
I try to see a silver lining in this though. With the spec deprecated, and sqlite 3 being long term supported, WebSQL is probably the most compatible, complete and stable of any of the HTML5 specs. And as long as the browsers I care about support it (safari, chrome and Opera) not having the spec change with every trend and and hype is not a liabilit but an asset.
Are we talking freedom from or freedom to? And how about if my freedom to tramples your freedom from?
The whole thing is yet another example of the feelgood "sjw" stuff that Mozilla have been throwing around in recent years, while turning a formerly potent browser in to a Chrome clone web terminal.
Not even sure if they have tested that site on their own offering, as jumping to and from the tab in Firefox made the whole thing crawl.