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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

An interesting page, yet the font has text-shadow enabled -- which on my monitor/desktop/browser, just makes it look blurry.

To me, it's barely legible.

It may appear different to others, for example when I looked on my phone, the effect was not as prominent. I'll pass.

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Author here, sorry about the text-shadow. I added it there many years ago and it seemed like a good idea back then. After webs started over-using various shadows and animations, I installed Stylus Firefox extension with rules disabling shadows and animations and completely forgot that the rule is still there! Removed now.

As others have mentioned Reader-Mode in Firefox bypasses this, but Dark-Reader extension (atleast on Firefox) brings back the legibility too.

This style habit (along with grey text on white/light-grey) is downright hostile to end-users and needs to stop.

Yeah the text is uncomfortable, thankfully Firefox's Reader mode worked well.

Did Firefox reader mode on Linux loose its TTS feature or was it never present on Linux? It was quite useful feature on macOS but I miss it on Linux now. I guess it has something to do with Pocket.

Reader mode is available (at least on FF version 85). There is a headphone icon appears on the upper left of the page and allows you to set the reading speed and choose from a bunch of different voices.

On Linux? I'm on FF 85 as well and all I see is the Font & Pocket button on the left panel in reader more and the headphone which was available on macOS is missing.

Yes, working here on Linux. Maybe go into about:config and look for "narrate" options, perhaps your "narrate.enable" is set to false?

narrate.enable is true, only narrate.test was false and making it true didn't help. I'll try digging deeper, thanks.

Mine has it. I'm guessing it is checking for a library and if it exists then it shows the icon because it showed up after a few seconds.

There are about a 100 different voices that I can choose from and they all suck.

A few months ago we trained a pretty nice DNN TTS engine and I wish I had the permission to release as a free software for Linux. I feel Linux has been in need of a good TTS forever.

I think you're correct, it seems speech-dispatcher was made an optional dependency for firefox build and that Arch requires 'festival-freebsoft-utils'[1] along with 'speech-dispatcher' for narrator but the former hasn't been updated in a long time. Not sure whether that's the reason, but narrator doesn't work even after installing those packages although the speech-dispatcher gets triggered in the firewall when the reader mode is accessed.

Interestingly, this is a closed bug in Arch. Guess it's time to reopen it.

[1]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/festival-freebsoft-utils/

[2]https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/50886

Thanks. I'm alternating between computer screens and I honestly though something was wrong with my eyes when I saw that article.

Looks okay in links. Oddly I get a 403 using w3m.

The web is slowly becoming unusable in modern browsers, a reverse of the earlier trend.

Yes, 403 Forbidden in lynx as well. This is a very unfortunate trend I've seen increasing over the last couple years. The answer almost always comes from an nginx server, but my understanding is that it's User-Agent sniffing being done for DDOS protection and the use of nginx (being used as a proxy?) is incidental. I have not been able to find any good discussions about it.

I think this has more to do with nginx being one of (if not the) most popular *nix web servers, rather than nginx administrators hating lynx users. I run plenty of websites with nginx that you can browse with lynx just fine.

Yes, sorry, I meant to make that more clear: this is NOT an nginx issue. It just HAPPENS that I always see nginx on the 403 page.

It appears somebody doesn't like lynx's User-Agent string and it makes me sad.

Lynx is also sending HTTP/1.0:

  GET /linux-capabilities-in-a-nutshell/ HTTP/1.0
  Host: k3a.me
  User-Agent: Lynx/2.9.0dev.5 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 GNUTLS/3.6.13

I am quite surprised actually. It is unfortunate that these clients still haven't been updated to at least HTTP/1.1. :(

Just patch Lynx to send HTTP/1.1 without implementing keep-alive or any other HTTP/1.1 functionality and your troubles will most likely end. :P It is better to have broken 1.1 implementation than broken 1.0.

CURL is using 2.0 for HTTPS and 1.1 for HTTP by default. Someone should upgrade these CLI browsers to use libcurl or something like that...

Author here. It is Nginx with ModSecurity. It looks like your client uses HTTP/1.0 which I blacklisted as HTTP/1.0 doesn't make sense nowadays as it originally didn't even support Host header for virtual hosts. HTTP/1.0 is often used by badly-written web scrappers.

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