Tell HN: News sites may have a “lite” version for low-bandwidth users | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: News sites may have a “lite” version for low-bandwidth users

87 pointsSamuelAdams40 comments

Examples:

https://lite.cnn.com/en

https://text.npr.org

I've used those in the past, but have switched to the CBC text only site [0] being my go-to. I found it via a nice blog post talking about text-only news sites [1] which describes the CBC pages' advantages as follows:

"1) fast-loading; 2) a world news page; 3) high-quality: includes stories from Reuters and Associated Press; 4) uniquely, a button to allow to you load any individual images you wish to view; 5) links at bottom of page to equivalent page on full size; 6) sitemap; 7) an actual release notes page!"

[0] http://cbc.ca/lite

[1] https://blog.wturrell.co.uk/text-only-news-websites/

Shameless plug: I made a French version of CBC Lite, with contents coming from Radio-Canada.ca[0]. It basically shares the same advantages, but the content is written in French and the build/content is refreshed every 30 minutes. It's built with Eleventy[1].

The project is called Radio-Canada Lite and it's over at https://rc-lite.xyz

[0] https://ici.radio-canada.ca

[1] https://www.11ty.dev

I found a list: https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites

That list is so random and inconsistent that I would not recommend visiting it. There are very few actual lite websites, a link to Wikipedia, some random "useful" sites and what I can only imagine is spam for some services.

Unfortunately a lot of those links aren't really "lite". They might be better than the site's main pages but I don't think they're equivalent to NPR's lite page for instance.

That's not the fault of that list maintainer, some sites may have bloated up their "lite" pages since they were added. I used to have several lite news sites bookmarked from back in the GPRS days that no longer exist.

I miss the WAP sites, whenever I get downgraded to EDGE on my network.

Fascinating that it is still in service. All of ours has been reclaimed for faster services and even 3g is starting to go away now.

I don't miss WAP as a technology but I also definitely miss WAP and WAP-like sites on mobile. So many "lite" sites have gone full JavaScript bloat and are lite only in name. It's is not difficult to add some minimal CSS for branding and just spit out static HTML.

I find the circular reasoning or bloat amusing. "We needs ads to pay for the resource usage of adding our ads!".

Also, must-be in the list (even though not a news site):

https://old.reddit.com/

Or, for mobile users: https://reddit.com/.compact

Works for every reddit link, too, just add .compact to the end.

https://i.reddit.com is easier to type

https://i.reddit.com/

A further optimization is to use uMatrix or something similar to block network requests other than essential text content. For example, that CNN Lite page is 7 kB as pure HTML, but doubles to 14 kB with CSS and favicons. Javascript ballons this to 80 kB, plus an unbounded amount of XHR (analytics pings I think -- I had to disable three privacy extensions to get them to send).

You can make that page literally 10x smaller with uMatrix!

This is mostly academic in 2022, unless you're in some disaster zone at <1 kbps and this is the only way to avoid network timeouts.

This is a little harder to do, but if you change your browser user-agent to something old (particularly IE10 or lower), you'll find that a lot more news sites have "lite" versions hiding behind content negotiation, rather than on a separate subdomain (particularly large news brands that would expect old users or business users in corporate environments where their browser choices may be limited).

68k.news is not for a single news source, but it's very light.

NOAA offers text only forecasts. Here's my current one: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=29.7089&lon=-9...

Should we start building up a collection of these lite news websites so people can make an extension to automatically redirect to them.

Maybe a GitHub repo with a list of these?

Here are the two I use the most

• https://www.cbc.ca/lite/

• https://text.npr.org/

I set one up, PR are welcome https://github.com/adenner/litenews

https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites

But at least yours is not dead. Wish there was a wiki site instead of github, seems a waste to keep a history when all you want is the latest version.

I actually worked on that for a bit but, looking at the plain html ugly result, I didn't think anyone would actually want to use it so I never made a proper release. Maybe with a little bit of css and more supported sites it could go somewhere.

I'm using it for one website still, basically cutting out the part from <h1> to the end of article, after they killed their perfectly fine .mobi website, but afaik I'm the only one. (There were two more sites but they broke.) If you're interested in working on this, give me a ping (email in profile).

Top tip: Reader mode on iPadOS/iOS Safari removes adverts & other junk & makes for a much better reading experience.

Most news sites are an utter nightmare these days with ads & autoplay videos.

Every browser except Chrome has a reader mode. Google keeps promising one, sometimes puts it in a testing channel, then removes it quietly.

For what it's worth, as of Version 98.0.4758.102, Chrome's Reading Mode is still in chrome://flags as one of the "Experiments"

It's almost like there's some perverse incentive for an advertising company to not make a browser mode that hides ads.

You can enable reader mode in Chrome on both Android and Desktop. https://www.howtogeek.com/423643/how-to-use-google-chromes-h...

Another approach I use is a bookmarklet to a site/tool called prereader. You can click the bookmark when on a site and it will render it in prereader without any of the additional content: https://github.com/egoist/preader#bookmarklet

I know how to enable it, but that's not the point. Google will always be able to take it away as long as it's only accessible to the handful of people who even think about this. It's come and gone before. This latest edition of the feature has been an "experiment" for years at this point. There's no good reason for that.

Defaults matter, and Google knows this. Every other browser has a button clearly visible in the default configuration and advertises it as a feature. There's no reason every Chrome-based browser has it except Chrome other than Google is afraid people will stop seeing ads.

The past few months I've been on a temporary internet connection, it says its 15meg but in reality its usually 3-5meg. Its given me a while new understanding of the need for lite sites, reducing file downloads and giving users options to just not load half the site. The 'reader' views don't really solve the issue because the site has to load first.

Youtube is the worst offender I've found. Loading one of their 'shorts' videos on the desktop in chrome. The video autoplays, except its just the audio first, the page hasn't loaded yet and still hasn't before the video has finished - and then it auto-skips to the next video!

As someone who doesn't use the facebook app on mobile, finding their basic version[0] was a life changer.

[0] https://mbasic.facebook.com/

Isn’t much of the “weight” of most of these sites due to the multiple third-party ad packages loaded on each page? Would a lite version drop ads?

The CNN one, at least, does drop the ads. Though probably not tracking (haven't looked at the source).

On a related note: What is the best way to browse the modern web on a resource limited computer like a netbook with 2GB of memory?

This makes the great candidates for gemini: gemini://rawtext.club/~sloum/geminews/

I knew about the NPR one because that is where NPR sent EU readers until it sorted out its GDPR policies.

Some US news sites still operate an even "liter" policy for European readers of not allowing them to read content at all.

As a for-instance:

The Ohio Capital-Journal simply says:

"This site not available in your country".

As text/plain.

Other sites throw 403s.

In general I don't think we're missing out on much in the way of journalism from the sites that do this, but there are some larger media groups that are still simply blocking European users rather than address privacy.

Like Google AMP?

How does AMP save bandwidth? Last I checked you needed to add a huge amount of code (more than all html/css/js resources on my lightweight site combined) hosted on another domain (extra dns lookup, extra tcp connection, extra tls handshake, extra http request) to use it at all. And that's where I stopped looking because I'm not going to have google track my visitors across every single page on my site - no thank you.

Do you think there is a market for an extension/service that allow you to browse any site in a lite version?(not by just blocking all optional files...but by adapting the site automatically)

That sort of exists in Firefox with its built-in reader mode[0].

[0]: https://www.howtogeek.com/352267/how-to-use-the-reader-view-... (used this one instead of the official Mozilla one, since this one shows what reader mode looks like.)

Reader Mode is really best-suited for longform article consumption, IMO. So reading an individual article in CNN works well in Reader Mode, but you wouldn't want to necessarily browsing the whole site that way. I'm not sure it would even work.

(EDIT: Nope. Front page doesn't even show the option. I believe Firefox expects some kind of meta tag to let it know that the page in question has a clearly-defined article/content body.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com