Subversive Computing
datagubbe.se
datagubbe.se
In general, the author's approach resembles mine with a few detail differences, and I never got onto Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. in the first place. I'm not completely de-Googled (unrooted Android phone here), but I do keep them at arm's length. Windows 10 is such a non-starter for me that when I bought a new laptop last year, before I even powered it up the first time I yanked out the SSD, replaced it with a bigger one, and then loaded Xubuntu on it.
with this little change, you automatically block 99% of trackers (which run from the tracker's domain) and enjoy mostly functional websites.
When needed, just open uMatrix, and allow scripts either globally or per domain, to get client side integrations to work.
another benefit is to disable iframes globally. uMatrix replace them with a link to the iframe content, which is what you really want 99% of the time you want an iframe (which is otherwise mostly used for ads)
* uMatrix is from the same author of UBO. and it is the perfect sweet spot between UBO and noScript, for advanced users.
In some paradise of the supremely competent users, an employer could leave it to the staff to choose Libre Office, Microsoft Office, Google Apps, who knows, maybe Word Perfect Office from twenty years ago, and to exchange documents in some common format. In the real world, good luck.
Until we start pushing basic search/investigative requirements onto "non-technical" users it's not going to get any better.
In the real world, it starts with computer classes at my school started out with teaching us how to mail merge so we could get some Microsoft certificate employers allegedly wanted (and this wasn't some trade school for office managers, it was the highest category of school in my country).
Nowadays kids apparently have some other proprietary learning programs on iPads and call that digitalization – they should rather be taught to differentiate between the tools and the knowledge they are trying to gain using those (the better students obviously will figure out themselves, though some might be discouraged by diving deeper into technical topics, but the teachers should get better training).
And most work places teach you not to think too much, if they hand you Google Docs, it's not really worth the fight to change anything, when there are greater issues like levels, bonuses and the next unnecessary layer of hierarchy being added with every reorg.
Honestly, I have a huge problem with this mentality even if I can agree with most other stuff. There is a lot of features and apps that are very useful that won't work without javascript. C'mon, this is a really bad point. It is not javascript itself that is bad, it's how people misuse it. Why would native apps be any better? People include tracking and alaytics in those as well and it's just even harder to block / know what actually gets monitored since the application is likely not sandboxed.
I use many apps that require javascript that is really good and privacy motivated. Apps like, Fastmail.com, DI.FM, podd.app etc. I use adblockers and a pihole to take out the worst offenders and tracking scripts.
The solution is not to go back in time and try to convince people to use sites without javascript, that will never work because there is a lot you cannot do without javascript. Drag and drop for example, video conference, photo editing etc etc. There are so many examples of apps that weren't possible before but now is. The web is clearly the best platform to be on since no one company can block you and you can self publish whenever you want. You are in control, not some shitty american company. I have a hard time actually believing that this person never use anything else than that shitty browser. I just don't buy it because the user experience is horrible.
Instead, it's better to lead by example. Build apps that challanges the modern overuse of javascript and tracking / analytics. Don't be the old guy that simply complains how everything was better in the past, you couldn't do shit on the web in the past and now 80%-90% of the applications I use on a daily basis is web based.
Well not necessarily, if you are like 1-2 devs it's really hard to manage to make such a web application if it's a complicated one. And for what reason? So that you can cater to the 0.00001% of the users because they hate javascript for no other reason than that they hate it?
> Of course I couldn't do photo editing with that concept in a browser, but that's not what I use a browser for anyway.
Maybe not you, but I certainly use my browser for that kind of purpose as one example of several that won't work with javascript disabled.
> Having this fallback also has the advantage that it helps disabled users and users on poor network connections.
Yeah maybe having an alternative for drag n drop helps disabled users but just removing javascript doesn't help them at all. I would actually argue the reverse. With javascript you can do text to speech for example for people that may have bad eye sight. On poor networks a well written PWA works a lot better than a traditional server side generated page, depending a bit on the application itself of course. I would agree that because SPA apps need to do stuff the browser does for you, people simply don't build resilient enough apps that handles failures well.
There are many bad SPA apps out there, but also many good. I was travelling and used Airbnbs web app that was terrific when I had a bad connection. I could still open up cached content and access a lot of stuff even if some things wouldn't load which was very good for me.
If you don't want to use javascript but still want a SPA like feel there are alternatives like Phoenix Liveview for example. They still use javascript, but it works without it since it's just server side generated stuff. Unfortunately it doesn't work well on bad connection or at all when offline but I guess most sites would be ok with that trade off.
Just like mobile-first doesn't mean (or shouldn't mean) "only mobile" but rather "write with the smallest screen in mind and then add features for bigger screens", you can first write the basics of the site using pure HTML and then put the JavaScript on top. It's not much more effort if done consciously.
> Maybe not you, but I certainly use my browser for that kind of purpose as one example of several that won't work with javascript disabled.
But that's not really relevant to the argument here. The author of the article doesn't say "all websites including those that mimic native apps should work without CSS and JavaScript" - that would be nonsense of course. Certain web-based apps will simply not work at all without JavaScript, that's fine, and it's fine if that's a reason for some person not to use them. But personally I think that websites (in particular those that are not "apps") should provide as much of their functionality as possible without requiring JS, where it's doable. A photo editing app certainly doesn't fall into that category, I think everyone is aware of that.
> Yeah maybe having an alternative for drag n drop helps disabled users but just removing javascript doesn't help them at all.
That's also not what I said and it wouldn't be graceful degradation. I'm all for having JavaScript that improves the usability of the site, as long as disabling it (or network failure preventing it from loading) won't break the site as a consequence. That, I think, is the key point here.
No but he does say and I'll quote "If they can't produce something worthwhile without scripting, it's probably not worthwhile at all." which to me means all sites that require javascript no matter of what the purpose is.
Sure, a information site with a few pictures and text doesn't need javascript. But I am not building nor talking about such sites. These kind of sites are built with tools like wordpress today and I think many web devs like me who live on the edge of whats possible on the web try to push the boundaries even more. I write javascript heavy apps because they solve problems that hasn't been solved on the web yet. Apps that previously wasn't possible now are and that is where you can dig gold.
I don't want to have to write a native app because I think the web platform is simply the best way of building apps since there is no other way to be in control and user don't have to download anything else than javascript, which are downloaded and runs automatically. The author obviously doesn't like javascript but as always he doesn't provide a good answer to why.
If I can write a web based tool that people can link to, use and then don't think about until next time they need it, it will probably get way, way more used than a tool that people need to download and install simply because the installation step is too much work for a lot of people.
EDIT: One recent example in mind : the web-based Big Blue Button video conferencing app : there doesn't seem to be a way to open chat and slide screen in two separate windows ! When your GUI is worse than what we had in Windows freaking 3.11, there's something that went really wrong...
Visual Studio Code
Slack / Teams / Skype
Fastmail / Gmail / Protonmail etc
GSuite / Office365
Figma
Conference apps like Google Meet, Discord etc
Pixlr
Music apps like Spotify, Tidal, Youtube Music, Apple Music etc
Trello / Jira etc
Seriously, there is only a few apps that I use that are not web apps. Suggesting that these multi million projects would be toy projects is just silly and ignorant.
You're the typical HN elitist, good job.
A lot of them are doing their best, but they are worse off being run in a browser !
For instance the Electron apps not only are generally slower than native programs, but if they are designed to also work in parallel in-browser (or god forbid, mobile), they are likely to be crippled in their keyboard shortcuts, or, as I already mentioned, multi-windows, both of those being foreign to web design.
- The new Skype is much worse than the old one.
- Gmail and Protonmail are much slower than Thunderbird. Protonmail also has less features.
- Gsuite is slower and has less features than Libre Office… with the exception of real-time collaborative editing, pushing it into a category of its own.
- Discord is perhaps the only program in this list that I've used that I would classify as "good", though it can sometimes be a bit heavy…
I use links2 as my main web browser and my experience has been exactly the opposite of that.
SPEED.
links2 is lightning fast to browse. Almost every website I load renders in less than 100ms. Every single page. If it doesnt render, than it's a javascript issue and I may open it in firefox if I really care.
So, by using links2, for almost all websites, I get instant loading, with no possible way for the browser to popup anything, distract me anyhow, just the data thankyouverymuch, get out of my way.
Does anyone else have experience with this? I usually use Windows so it wouldn't be from a cli most likely.
If you follow people who post daily photos of their dinners, daily photos of dinners is what you get. That's certainly not how my IG feed looks.
This site is full of pompous know-it-alls never missing an opportunity to humblebrag about their superior intellects."
I'm a photography enthusiast who usually post my photos on it, and use it regularly as one of visual reference sources.
Ditching IG is pretty hard. Hmm...
So, similar to youtube-dl?
Fair