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Comment by jdowner | Hacker News Reader

I find it astonishing how much of my laptops resources are occupied by a web browser. But I came to believe that it was not necessarily a problem with the web browsers per se but that each website would have a variety of javascript constantly running, and most of that code is not providing any information that I want. So I have turned off javascript in the browser. It breaks many sites, but, especially for news sites, it makes for a quieter experience.

I also like to archive many of the articles that I read, but I don't like keeping bookmarks. So I wrote a small utility to convert html to text by combining 'readability' (python) and lynx (text-base web browser), which does a nice job of formatting the content and storing the hyperlinks as footnotes. This archive is also nice and easy to index if you are so inclined.

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I have a 2006 fully functional laptop with 1GB of RAM. I installed Lubuntu on it. All the modern browsers I have tried bring the laptop to its knees. I cannot do anything else but wait for pages to load. My dad's Windows 7 2011 laptop with 2GB of RAM also struggles when browsing the modern web.

On my Linux laptop I have no choice but to use a text browser. I currently prefer links2[1]. The speed along with the lack of distractions is something I enjoy when using a text browser. Text only sites like HN are great (except comments not indented). [1]http://pupnik.de/links2.html

I have this project of moving most of my browsing to EWW (the native web browser in Emacs) and using a full-fledged web browser only when I need to use some web app. But many content-only websites are going with completely dynamically rendered pages with React or what not, so all you have is void at worst if you disable JS or view with a text-only browser, and garbled up unreadable stuff if you're lucky. Also e.g. the comment hierarchy of HN does not render nicely with text browsers.

Agreed. I am using opera at the moment with javascript turned off by default. But there are some sites I want to use that are simply non-functional without javascript enabled. I add those sites to a list of exceptions. However, as a result of having javascript off by default, I will sometimes find a site that I cannot view and it makes me ask the question -- do I really want to see this content? is this a site that I want to add to my list of exceptions? I find it useful to ask those questions and step back from browsing to reflecting on whether that is the best use of my time right then. ymmv.

That's what I used to do with xombrero actually. Xombrero was my browser of love... If I was any good at C programming, I'd port it to WebKit 2 (I actually started the project, thinking of hacking my way to really learning C and the relevant APIs, but I was daunted and gave up). With FF, which is what I use nowadays, it's way too bothersome to work with that. UBlock kind-of helps, but I do miss block-by-default days...

I have a similar system, but using pandoc to output markdown

https://github.com/davidar/peruse

Sounds good, would you share your source code?

Sure.

https://gist.github.com/25facbfd1aa3816457ba9c5d2040cd3c

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