Comment by hawski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hawski | Hacker News Reader

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For me it's the browser. What I did yesterday on Firefox for Android:

- installed uBlock Origin (also First Party Isolation and HTTPS Everywhere),

- disabled JavaScript via about:config javascript.enabled,

- and added .css| rule to uBlock Origin (I would still like to disable CSS entirely, this only half works).

Basically I would like to have "links2 -g" [0] for Android. There is also an extension for Firefox to automatically enable reader mode [1]. It waits for additional WebExtensions API. I want to omit CSS, because of:

- too small or too big font size,

- no proper text wrapping,

- wrong contrast, too big margins,

- position:fixed bars that are so trendy right now.

Basically I want to bail out of modern web. However I would probably use modern web apps on proper browser when I want an app, but just not when I want to read some information.

I know that there are sites with good content that will be broken because of it. But it will be only a minor collateral damage.

I added to my long todo-list a modern pure HTML browser for Android and Linux. What would also help is a different search engine. Of course I also have one in my todo-list. A search engine that would _not_ index ad serving sites. Also as an option it could not show JavaScript enabled sites.

I know about Million Short, but it does not cut it.

Such a pair of a browser and a search engine is, or rather will be, my answer.

Also it's sad a smartphone with it's array of sensors is not a proper tricorder...

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22links2+-g%22&tbm=isch

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

The browser is the time-sink for me too. Unfortunately, iOS makes it difficult to get Safari out of your life. My dream is a content blocker that requires you to unlock it in order to browse the time-sink sites you choose to greylist; and each time you unlock it, unlocking gets more arduous.

I have leechblock for some sites, alows 20 minutes every four hours or so and then it just redirects to a work/education forum I like instead.

You can use Configurator to disable Safari among other things. Had a pared down 5c a while back that I made distration free :)

Thing is, I don't want to block it entirely. Sometimes you just need to look stuff up. Just limit time spent on time suck sites. The real problem is that there's no way to tell the OS to open links from other apps into a different browser that you can add better controls to.

Get an iPhone, use Safari, and turn on automatic "reader" mode . You'll get everything you actually want.

I think you can have links on Android using something like Termux [https://termux.com] (but you probably won't enjoy it that much on a small screen with a touch keyboard).

Maybe I will try it if the font can be set to something big, but I'm one of those bastards that prefer proportional fonts even for source code. However it's still not "links -g" - this one supports images. Images are mostly useless on most pages, but with uBlock Origin I also limit images bigger than 50kB, that filters out most junk, but probably also have a lot of false positives.

elinks actually kind of supports touch input in Termux. I tend to use it when I'm in a spot with very bad data coverage and need to check something. It's surprisingly usable.

When the first Motorola Droid came out, I found a "tricorder" app with a lot of the sensor data output with a LCARSish UI. It may have since been lawyered out of existence.

Trycorder. It is still around, I think I most recently installed it from F-Droid

It's not in the store, but apk's are around.

Is there demand for a tricorder app? Sounds like a cool weekend project

I also use Firefox but did not know about the Automatic reader mode, thanks! I used Dark background with White text extension which loads images. I can't get Automatic reader mode to work on Firefox Beta from Play Store, any ideas? I turned on all pages in the extension settings. BTW Termux has w3m and Links2 on the repo.

On the extension's page there is a mention about missing API in Firefox. I don't know when it will be added.

Links may be in Termux, but it's not the graphical one. But I will check it out.

Have you already seen this?

https://surf.suckless.org/

It's webkit, not firefox-based, but works great with tiling windowmanagers.

I've seen it. Sadly it's just a nice thin interface over WebKit. I guess I could customize it to do somewhat what I want, but it would still run on WebKit. On Linux I can use alternative browsers like links -g, WebSurf or Dillo, but on mobile there are no such luxuries.

I would just like to have the target experience (and lightness) out of the box, but on all platforms.

Netsurf, you meant. BTW, install trickle (a bandwitdh limiter) and then:

trickle -s -t 1 -d 16 -u 8 netsurf-gtk

You'll enjoy the delays.

I use startpage.com on night mode, it's minimal on css and does not track.

But doesn't it have the same index as Google? I would probably prefer to have my idea of a search engine implemented before the browser one. Because then not only the search interface would be light and serving me instead of corporate interests, but also all the found sites. Also I could use it on regular browser.

duckduckgo ?

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