My experience of the web is about a thousand times better than it used to be.
I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.
Good: HN works well and handles the downgrade gracefully (ex: upvoting becomes a POST rather than AJAX).
Bad: The original Reddit site works ok but the new React based one one fails miserably as it shows a loading screen that never changes.
(Also, they probably save money on electricity by externalizing more and more processing to users.)
But reddit seems to know they suck at websites: you can still access https://old.reddit.com/r/<whatever> and even https://old.reddit.com/r/<whatever>/.compact for the old site and the old old site.
People who are also writing content-based apps and want to write once but still obtain native speeds on mobile? The lack of right-click functionality is just bad design, not React's fault.
With browsers and heavy JavaScript frameworks? That's an oxymoron right there.
The truth is, people/organizations doing this simply put other concerns above user experience and friendliness.
React is fine for browser-based line-of-business (and I guess also collaboration) apps; for content, not so much because you have to go through hoops to parse content into React's vdom [1].
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50420248/how-to-parse-a-...
Reactive Native's primary selling point (and nature of existence) is that it uses native components instead of wrapping a webview. This is the most obvious, relevant, and hyped detail of React Native. So your statement, "React Native is a browser" implying the same performance penalties as visiting as a website or using Cordova/PhoneGap, is false.
There is nothing native about a website which has actual lagging while I scroll when the previous version could do it just fine in desktop mode.
The irony is, Reddit on mobile is god-awful slow. It takes a good 5-10 seconds of displaying a spinner just to show me a kilobyte of text (self-post or linked comment). I no longer click Reddit links on mobile for this reason.
Reddit has got to have talented people working for it. But whatever they're doing that results in a 10-second spinner to display pure text is "Mongo DB is web-scale" levels of comedy.
https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv
I think there needs to be a movement to bring the WWW back to basic, readable, low-JS, animation-free, content-based sites.
I don't think there is a list, but I'd say it heavily depends on your browsing behaviour. In my case the vast majority of web sites that I access randomly (mostly trough some feed or aggregator) are text based and actually more pleasant to use without js: Faster, no jumping around of content, no obnoxious subscribe modals, almost zero ads, etc. If it doesn't work without js, I usually just close the tab. I hold the view, that if something is important enough for me to care, it will reach me in some form or the other eventually.
But if you are mostly about multi media content, checking out tech demos or similar, you are going to have a bad time.
You can use the "Quick JS switcher" plugin to easily enable js for a page
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quick-js-swit...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s...
I'm quite lenient in white listing, because for me personally disabling js is mostly about performance. If I'm interested enough in a web sites offering and see the utility of it requiring js, I'm also willing to wait a little. But I'm not patient by default
From the wiki page, there are many useful FAQ/ guides/ docs. Specifically, there is a link to a decent guide:
http://adamantine.me/index.php/2015/11/18/umatrix-desperatel...
edit: using both is redundant
In fairness to gorhill it's a couple of years since I last looked at uMatrix so it may be much improved.
uMatrix handles network stuff (blocking css, js, media, etc).
uBlock also handles network stuff, but the difference is that uBlock can also block specific elements on the page, eg, divs by id or class.
If you block all JS and CSS with umatrix, you can still read articles by pressing the "reader view" button in Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...
Same thing with cookies.
On a side note, web developers have gotten really lazy at feature checking. In the IE days they'd at least have a banner saying their page wasn't going to work because it required IE or Netscape. Browsing with cookies turned off nowadays, I hit one or two sites a day that won't even display and then often get stuck in infinite redirect loop.
Even white listing sites to use cookies is a PITA. Outlook for Office65, for example, requires white listing cookies from 3 or 4 domains, and due to the way it redirects, I had to dig around in Chrome's page inspector to even find out what those domains are. And of course the page itself gives no indication of why it's not loading, it just flashes between empty pages forever.
My experience is the opposite.
I used NoScript for almost 8 years, and then switched to uMatrix one year ago.
I don't need to enable JavaScript in most sites. And, if I need it, only enable some parts of the page. Most websites are much faster with this.
It used to be that disabling JS rendered web pages illegible. But good CSS changed that. So now you can read sites perfectly fine with JS. You can't interact, but you can read.
EDIT: Wow I just tried disabling JS on nytimes.com and it's INCREDIBLE. Reallly, try it. In Chrome I used the pattern [*.]nytimes.com. Not sure what that syntax is.
Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...
Which will be when access portals (currently search engines, and app stores for apps) heavily correlate resource usage with ranking / commission / etc.
Currently, the biggest access portal(s) are invested in ads, so not any time soon. But when every kb drops your pagerank one point, and every cpu cycle costs an extra penny of App Store commission, that is when the entire market will suddenly follow.
It’s not soon but it’s not never. It’s possible.
But I think the industry’s solution to this has always been to just wait for the inevitable faster and faster computers that come out each year, so that the lag becomes less just by the passage of time. But that becomes a cat and mouse game because as CPU’s and network speeds get faster and storage gets cheaper, developers can get away with larger sites and slower code.
case in point, nowadays you can barely browse the web with an iPhone 4, but when it first came out people weren’t waiting 30 seconds for a pageload on it. Even look at the average size of an app in the App Store now. I think facebook was 40MB when it first was released, now it’s 300MB. It’s like you have to keep getting newer and newer hardware just to keep up.
You surely aren't using it anymore, are you? They are now owned by an ad company.
They are a German company very much covered by GDPR, so I think it's relatively safe to use the tool this way. I'd be happy to hear otherwise though.
I also recommend Decentraleyes, Smart Referer, First Party Isolation and Facebook Container. Plus of course HTTPS Everywhere.
It's hard for me to imagine productive browsing without most of those addons now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gdpr/comments/8m3t1s/ghostery_celeb...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghostery/comments/8m3nqq/did_ghoste...
Nowadays, the Ghostery extension is owned by Cliqz GmbH, which is still an ad company, but they specialize in privacy-conscious ads (mainly ad personalization based on evaluating browser history locally), have a privacy policy that has no holes as far as I can tell, have all of their client-side code open-sourced and they are even minority-owned by Mozilla, so Mozilla can at least check over what they're doing and would probably give up ownership should Cliqz infringe on privacy (even if you think Mozilla itself is the devil, they would still likely do that for PR reasons).
So, I do think it is nowadays fine to use Ghostery. I still don't quite understand why it's so popular, there's tons of other tools for the same purpose (for example Disconnect, Privacy Badger, Firefox's built-in Tracking Protection), but yeah.
Maybe, maybe not.
The problem with straight up blocking of all ads is obviously it cuts of funding for content creators whose work I enjoy.
What I really want is blocking of the ridiculous crap you find in ads, but still allow reasonable publishers to show ads & monetize.
That's why I'm hopeful for the "Coalition for Better Ads". It's essentially trying to define that standard across multiple parties.