Comment by welly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by welly | Hacker News Reader

The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm careful on what I click on.

The modern web browsing experience is clearly not what TBL had in mind when he started developing the web.

Newspaper sites seem to want you to do everything but actually read the story you've clicked on to read.

Take this for example: https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-doesnt...

Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web.

Following this, we have a few short paragraphs that are actually the story we came to read. A huge image, then more links to take you away from the story. Another handful of short paragraphs, another link to take you away from the story and this repeats until we get to the end of the story we came to read. Some comments follow the story (with a bunch of more links to take us away between the two, of course) and then what feels like an infinite scroll of sponsored links.

I think the Daily Mirror is possibly one of the worst (one of many reasons I don't ever visit this site except by mistake or in the case of this comment) but I'm finding more and more websites are almost impossible to read. Which is why I don't really spend much time on the web these days. I'd say the majority of my web browsing habits come via youtube these days.

HN is usually pretty reliable for decent content that is easy to consume, but beware if you click on a link found via Google or DDG (or other mainstream search engines)

> Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web.

This the the modern newspaper. Newspapers have some of the most useless, hostile web sites out there. It’s one of the biggest reasons why they’re dying. They’re squandering their brands and public trust and actively driving readers away by providing a horrifically bad product.

The article makes it sound like this is just the way “the web” is these days, like there’s some force of nature compelling newspapers to build awful products. But there isn’t. They are choosing to build their businesses around advertising networks.

It’s not fair to the web to say newspaper sites are typical or the only option. Much of the web isn’t like that though. There are plenty of blogs and web apps that are a joy to use. And there are plenty of journalism businesses that succeed without ad network revenue - e.g. The Economist, the Athletic, Daring Fireball, Stratechery.

> The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm careful on what I click on.

NoScript is pretty useful for this. If a website doesn't work without JavaScript, odds are very good the author's incentives are something other than to convey information, so the content is probably not worth consuming anyway.

I'll give that a try!

And in many cases (including this article), Firefox's Reader View will fix websites that don't work without JavaScript. As a bonus, it also removes all "design".

It's kind of shocking how often I use Reader View now, particularly on mobile. If stripping a page of all design elements is a feature, how is that design not intrinsically user-hostile?

I used to use NoScript religiously, but since the move to `quantum` I couldn't seem to get it to work right. Either I couldn't understand the icon system or or was buggy. Has it improved since then?

Quantum deprecated the old method of Add-On development in favor of Web Extensions. NoScript didn't have a Web Extensions version initially and has been working out the transition ever since. But that was 2 years ago...

There was a hiccup during the Firefox WebExtension switch, but it has been working fine for a long time now. I even use it on mobile, which is a lifesaver.

I switched to uMatrix when NoScript wasn't working with Quantum yet. I think I like it better than NoScript now anyway, and have never gone back.

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