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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

Wired has started doing something strange.

This URL doesn't load in my version of Firefox (old and heavily tweaked, I admit). And it crashes Midori.

But this works fine:

$ w3m -dump https://www.wired.com/story/the-fda-announces-two-more-antac...

Edit: OK, it works in my Firefox if I hit escape as soon as the page has loaded. So maybe there's some non-content module that loads more slowly, and triggers the problem. It could be a "turn off ad blocker" popup. Given that I block popups.

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I’m constantly amazed by comments like this one posted by highly technical people who manage to become unable to view a simple website by making the endeavor vastly over-complicated.

Meanwhile, Grandma can read the article just fine when she double clicks on the blue e.

A simple website is HTML and CSS. They work everywhere.

Exactly.

I have no problems with maybe 90% of sites. So I'm pretty confident that the rest are doing something odd, and likely not in my best interest.

Some cool sites do require WebGL, which I block. But I can't imagine that's needed to display text and images. And I can even handle NYT's trippy images layout.

I really have no clue what some sites are doing, however. It could be ad blocking, or the fact that I'm using a German VPN exit. Or maybe one or both of those plus blocking popups. Maybe referrer and/or fingerprint obfuscation.

But it's easier to find workarounds for that ~10% than figure out just exactly how they're breaking basic HTML and CSS.

I'd like to find out more about what kind of setup Grandma has, in that case. I'm sitting here on an unmodified Safari installation, and the top of the window is obscured by a giant floating banner ad, while the bottom is obscured by a "subscribe" banner, which is _itself_ obscured by an oversized cookie notice. All of which leaves less than 80px of height to read the actual article content. Given the nice large font size, that means I can see three lines of text at any given moment. I didn't have the same issue that GP did, but it's definitely true that Wired has been adopting some awful web development practices for a while now.

(Side note: My kids' grandma is a retired software developer. So I guess maybe it's just that the average grandma is more sophisticated than we are?)

Huh. So maybe my problem is some mix of blocking ads and popups.

I’ve noticed certain sites, like government websites (my local healthcare.gov site), banking sites, insurance sites, only work if you disable tracking protection entirely in safari/firefox, and one of them (I think the healthcare site) only worked in chrome with no ad blocker.

Folks, this is not a good sign.

Yeah, it's an arms race.

Don't tell us, make the call - and don't disable.

It's more like blocking exploits, I'd say. Which your prototypically clueless Grandma is vulnerable to. So her machine is likely sending spam, or worse.

Let's not confuse invasive ads and tracking cookies with "exploits." We can dislike both, but they are definitively not the same thing and one is clearly a bigger real threat than the other.

I consider tracking to be an exploit.

I mean, there are laws against stalking, right?

how many times do ad services have to inadvertently push malware until we can just lump them into the 'malicious' category?

Those same technical people get to help grandma when that simple webpage has eaten the blue e. PEBBAS - Problem Exists Between Browser And Site/Server/Storage.

If it were a simple website it wouldn’t be broken. The over-complication here isn’t in the browser, it’s in the website.

Most of the comments are to let others/the page owner know about bad or unexpected behavior - like not working with JS disabled, or not loading under edge conditions.

Loads perfectly for me with js disabled via ublock origin, just a clean article.

What browser?

Are you in the EU?

You are blocking ads, I presume?

Do you see any popups?

Android Firefox with uMatrix in the EU. All js disabled. No popups. Site works fine.

This is my setup, yeah. Except ublock origin rather than umatrix.

Blocking ads, blocking js, EU. Firefox on Android.

Additionally, my traffic and dns go through a (also EU hosted) DO droplet which is running pihole and dnscrypt.

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