Making the Web Boring Again
washbear.neocities.org
washbear.neocities.org
Has anyone here seriously tried Pale Moon which is referenced in the linked blog post? How does it do for everyday browsing and ad/tracker blocking?
I would rather like Apple to take the lead on this one. They have a ridiculous amount of money and control over a not insignificant portion of the market. They could use this for good if they tried simply from having enough momentum to kill anything bad dead by not implementing it.
It's not an ideal situation of course. Having the planet's core infrastructure completely open for contribution would be better.
(if only the EU used their fines to do that...)
Funnily enough though a lot of web developers really hate Apple for this (going as far as claiming "Safari is the new IE" which is just ridiculous). But as a former Pale Moon developer I think Apple is the "lesser evil" than Mozilla exactly because they're "slow" in implementing the latest "Living Standard". Oh and just like us they've rolled out a JPEG XL support enabled by default in their stable release before Mozilla and Google did ;)
I am running a mac and find the interface to look crude and "cross platform", if that makes sense. Performance is very jerky, and font rendering isn't great - although that's perhaps subjective. Icons seem low resolution everywhere and in general it has the vibe of an outdated QT program. I was able to install a legacy version of ublock origin but it doesn't seem possible to use 1password, which is a dealbreaker for me.
I like the idea but I wouldn't be able to use pale moon day to day.
Under-the-hood is an engine that is pretty modern though (at least for a vast majority of the websites I regularly use, and plenty are "Web 2.0"). It's not as updated in terms of web compatibility as Mozilla's Gecko, and I'm not going to hold my breath for that, even though I love this browser very much and have contributed code to the Pale Moon / UXP project. Trying to "catch up" in the WHATWG's "Living Standard" is just going to be an endless uphill battle because of Chrome doing implementations first before doing consultations with real stakeholders like website authors in writing the spec to see if the features they want to push to the rest of the web are really necessary and beneficial. It's amazing we're still able to make advancements on this front like getting Google's WebComponents supported or dynamic module imports.
I’m very happy with Brave with all its silly ads/crypto/news things turned off.
Do software engineers have time to do this without being a company that makes money behind? It feels strange somehow as it’s not the only project that does this.
When I have 5 minutes on the weekend, it’s always dedicated to take care of my family, not creating startup-like OSS like this.
All of this is especially hard to take in the form of #000 text on #FFF background with no headings or context… Design principles are science, not zoomer corruptions!
Anybody can easily put text, images, video, audio online.
Finding something that is interesting is the hard part for me.
I would like to see examples of individuals putting out interesting content.
I mean apart from entertainment. Not stuff that is just funny or beautiful or thrilling.
Is there any blogger, tweeter, activitipubber, blueskyer, nostrerer or whatever out there, where you guys think "Damn what they are doing is cool and interesting. I learn something from it for my life. I can't wait for the next update!"?
The only thing notable left in my mind which I await with interest is Ken Shirriff's blog: http://www.righto.com ... oh and Retraction Watch: https://retractionwatch.com
I've been having good luck with RSS and https://search.marginalia.nu
E.g. I recently listened to a really interesting podcast about the indoeuropeans "invasion" of Europe.
I agree it's somewhat harder to find good stuff among the chaff, but it's not like it's not out there.
it's in italian tho
The internet has completely consolidated itself into a few websites now, and that's the entirety of people's experience using the internet now. They go to, at most like 5 or so separate sites regularly if that many and that's it. As well, social media is made to feel ephemeral so you must check it every 10 minutes or you'll have lost loads of context or information and be out of the loop- forget about doing it only once a day. Since Twitter, tumblr, instagram etc have closed their APIs, there's no chance at accessing updates through an external reader, and you're forced to scroll and scroll to get anything, most of which now isn't even who you follow but rather just what they assume you might like or what is garnering the most rage engagement at the time.
back in the old days, "surfing" was a huge part of your internet usage: after you checked up on your forum threads and usenet keywords- which was easy to do since you were able to simply read up and then you were caught up for the day- you could check out affiliate links or webrings for new sites to enjoy. Surfing around was lots of fun and you found a bunch of new stuff all the time that way, and almost all of it was made by hand by one or a few people.
I enjoyed Live Journal, where if you were a fan of whatever early 00s TV series or movie, there'd be a community made there for you to go and instantly fold in with a bunch of other fans. No need for pretense or establishing context, they'd all watched the show as well, and you wouldn't have to tone down references or discussion for laymen who stumbled across it like you do for most social media today. You can't have an in-depth conversation about something you enjoy on social media, and if you try, you're in a crowded room yelling over other people walking by, everyone can hear and see, and you're forced to act like you're being observed by thousands of passers-by instead of having a conversation in a room.
the vibe is so different. Everyone I know who used the internet back then remembers it fondly, and kids today who never did think it's a much better idea. What do we have to do to just... go back?
Other than that, "just go back"? The old mailing lists are much quieter than they were now that quite a few of us are dead and only a few of our kids had any interest, but many of mine are still chugging, complete with high context in depth conversation.
USENET is apparently current, judging by the circumstantial evidence given by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41743206
Webrings are still extant, eg https://geekring.net/site/NUMBER/random
Blogs felt like digital degradation back when Winer was first pushing them, but as they've proven to be better than their successors I still have buckets of them in my newsboat* config.
The kids wail about "discovery". When I grew up, finding other geeks was a physical matter of 'zines and cons, uphill in the snow, both ways. Sure, now you won't get them served up in your algorithmic feed, but it's still much easier than in the old days: you go click click click click click click click click. It's real easy.
(but those clicks have to be choices, not scrolling)
> “When I use a tech,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it connects how I choose it to connect (albeit sometimes more than less).”
> “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make a tech serve so many different purposes.”
> “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw
* most excellent for a "check once per day" workflow
EDIT: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3243470 suggests AO3 may be a suitable forum for the sorts of conversations covered by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41539741 ; after having seen https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... I'm just waiting for a Gen Z coup launched by cadres in fursuits who hid their plotting via thousand-page screeds in channels superficially meant to serve the Fallout/MLP crossover fandom.
Wasting away again in burzum-ishi
Searching for my ash nazg gimbatul
Some people claim that there's a kuduk to blame
But I know I was my own damn foolDid you catch the ages of the judges that decided the case? They made Biden look spry. Welcome to the system that determines the legitimacy of who gets to create media.
So now instead you get the enshittification and the media that can survive in a section 230 environment (random lossy memes, onlyfans and mr.beasts).
Personally I built a LJ-type of site for a single niche (kpopping.com if you're curious) and there's a handful of sites like mine, but you need to look hard -- in most cases they'll be buried by Google under a dozen corporate fandom-types and don't forget the wordpresses with neon backgrounds that have figured out how to install Yoast-- never can get too many of them either.
If it was, I think we’d see as many new browsers as we do independent small game engines.
I suspect two things: it’s so poorly defined that we’ll have to accept this to accept new browsers, and that we will have to blatantly ignore it in order to create a simplified standard alternative layout algorithm.
People have Internet Explorer a lot of crap for being non-standard but there is no standard. All the intern projects like WASP did absolutely nothing to make CSS well-defined.
It just created the industry expectation that we’d all copy each other to fill in the gaps. If you read the codebases of the major web browser engines, it’s clear they do this in small but meaningful ways that would otherwise break various layout properties.
So I say screw it, since the people at Google basically hijacked web standards and refuse to give us popularly asked for features (check the web standards issue trackers for years-long open feature requests) just ignore them.
Make people bend the web standards to what you want them to be and then rally people to use your browser for fun and the love of using technologies that don’t hate you and abuse your expectations of privacy and the value of the hardware that you buy.
In this epoch, the major drawback of native apps it's an internal distribuition the last versions, think what we want intranet ? because we does not want need redistribute the software cross the park, goes to 500 km/miles away because some installation refuse to open and the local it does not understading the software.
The "scale" of web it's to be create a new world, of major features "uniformed" and of course does not need think about the operation system because the browser it's to be your minimum multiple common, if you have the feature available cool, does not check specify if the device it's from a file, from a special driver.
And the Google, Apple and the whatwg team appears, it's to be better the w3c and ok xhtml does not work a intent, go back to html4 and get the best of two worlds.
10y after we here stuck because the whatwg team stop of listen and reassemble the drama over again :(