Yes, Mozilla's behavior is increasingly worrying. As mostly everyone here I presume I'm eager for the Ladybird project [1] to release their browser and have very I hope about it. In the meantime I'm stuck with a day-by-day degrading Firefox, the degrading speed being mitigated by Debian stable packaging speed in my case, which is at least something.
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 had a look at pale moon out of curiosity. Here's what a new install looks like: https://imgur.com/a/f5FqOsO
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 Icons seem low resolution everywhere and in general it has the vibe of an outdated QT program.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.
I have a lot of problems with Chrome, especially recently but I really don’t like the firefox UX. I can’t remember exactly now but I gave it another try about a year ago and there were so many annoying inconsistencies. Profile UX is basically not even there. Do they still do their own custom janky scrolling? Devtools is clunky and slow. There were definitely more problems too.
I’m very happy with Brave with all its silly ads/crypto/news things turned off.
I don't think they really have a chance if I'm honest.
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.
Well, if Apple really wanted to do more, they would have implemented new APIs sooner and be in sync with Chrome and Firefox regarding features they support. (Currently Safari is often 1 year late in supporting lastest features.) I would not count on them.
I take it you disagree with the thesis of the article, which is that new features are a thing we need less of, as they’re being used to preclude the possibility of competition with the dominant browsers.
I think websites will adopt WEI/attestation or forced login (probably with Google), blocking out any non-Chrome-family browser, faster than Firefox degrades.
To deal with bots that are increasingly good at evading bot detection and to track user data, made possible because we let an ad and tracking company control the technology for over ninety percent of browsers.
I've used pale moon for years, but slowly faded back to firefox caused by the increasing websites that doesn't work with it. In this moment I've started a update and will try it again.
This is probably a dumb question, but are any of the Firefox forks (IceCat, LibreWolf, Pale Moon) particularly reassuring with regard to security? I know the article calls it "fear, uncertainty, and doubt", but the browser is the only part of my computer that regularly downloads and executes untrusted code.
I don’t want to spread FUD and it’s a really honest question but I always wonder who are behind such huge projects. The web site looks great, and forking must be a full time job.
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.
From my perspective, the web is fine from a technological standpoint.
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!"?
I'm not sure that content exists any more in any reasonable quantity. Occasionally a video will pop out which is interesting from someone but generally it's all below average. The attention dynamics have focused all content onto retaining viewers and reinforcement metrics around that. This normalised everything into mediocrity and delivering longer content with no meat.
I feel a lot of content creators moved to videos or podcasts, I think cause that's easier to monetizes, but there seems to be _a lot_ of cool and interesting things being put on the web these days.
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 a bit lazy of me, but let others submit links to each update to a website, and then another group of users up vote the content, and then I use that website to find such content. I could curate such content myself, but I would still need some sort of an algorithm to surface the truly quality content from the morass of updates.
Depending on the websites you usually browse, Dillo or Netsurf could be enough. But if you need to deal with online banking or government services - time to open "real" browser.
I know it’s hard to notice when you’re in it, but the good points here are buried behind a mountain of nostalgia. The problem with the internet is not that it uses too many JS frameworks. The fact that you used a company’s website one time that’s broken is a function of capitalism, not React. There has never been a better time for the diversity and capability of websites in general, again excepting the monopolization of social media niches by big corporations driven by Display Ad money. Interested developers—and laypeople!-can do way more with way less, and it’s likely to look good while they’re doing it.
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!
Creating a new browser from scratch is hard primarily because CSS 2.1 is not well defined in the specifications. I’ll keep repeating it until others catch on and read it for themselves.
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.
Sometimes i think i'm crazy of see this happened and does not rejected this, long time ago, rembering compiling Phoenix alpha (the first fork) and think oh-my-god now we have hopped of the internet does not be only ie only, 2-3 years after i see chrome launch directly in an google offices and think cool, now we have 4 major browser, and the old web drama it's be over, finnaly i can put the old erps and pos system and does not need install and versions bugs.
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 :(
I had a great conversation about this the other day with a bunch of strangers- we all shared the exact same early 00's internet experience and were all reminiscing about those halcyon days
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?
Gemini gave me a LJ vibe last time I checked it out.
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.
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.”
LiveJournal of course famously got sent on a long march to Russia because a group of photographers didn't like that they were using their photos while having an active moderation team.
Did 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.
Apologies for the rant in advance. The web is horrible these days and I hate it. I'm in favour of making it not only boring but simpler.
Native apps are still the best end user experience by far, have the highest performance, consistency and the least memory and resource footprint. They are by nature local-first. That isn't a shocking new concept which is promoted suddenly as if it's a new discovery. It was the default since personal computing appeared. I know this is the wrong place to shoot web apps what with the prevalence of SaaS companies and startups (hell I work for one) but it's just an awful existence at the moment for customers who are held prisoner rather than served because it's more convenient for the supplier.
As for content I'd rather read a PDF than a web site. The web sites have become a tiny window of content with bad typography and colours in the middle of a sea of decorative excrement and subscription threats. The peak for me would be an RSS feed of PDFs which I can open in Preview on my Mac. Gopher was as close to reality as that ever got.
HN is a notable exception I will add but that is because it entirely, and ironically considering the principal users, rejects most of the insanity.
Circling back round to the article, remove most of the pile of hacks and we will have a proliferation of vendors because it isn't a moonshot building another browser.
I can definitely agree with the local first native apps. I started learning dart/flutter for this reason, so I can use one code base across multiple platforms, but I get the impression you'd likely not agree with my choice.
I do disagree about the web being poor for content though. Properly done it is way better than PDFs. Provided it's simple and clean.
I have no problem what language or stack you use as long as you only compile it once, not every time you click something. There are energy and memory savings to be made :)
It's definitely not better for content. It's impossible to reference easily, everything is transient and ephemeral, layouts differ all over the place, there is no concept of location other than anchors which are poorly defined, typography is "variable" and goes somewhere from hooky to crack smoking, still to this day half of the images are rasters, it's near impossible to save bits of it locally if you want to keep it, it's difficult to print and importantly the moment you add something dynamic to it you multiply the damage by 10x for all of the above.
If you're talking simple content, text and images, and you're not trying to do "clever" stuff like making fancy transitions or anything that involves oodles of JavaScript then I can't see how the web isn't on par with pdf. I'd say it's better.
I hate modern sites where you need JavaScript to load text and images.
My issue with pdf is it's a shit show behind the scenes.
Pure native apps are simply not economical anymore.
And what platform do you even mean? Windows? Mac? iOS? Android? Linux?! KDE or Gnome?!?!
And somehow UWP apps manage to be even more sluggish and resource-hogging than webapps despite being "native". Native Android SDK apps aren't faster than webapps either if you exactly match the layout (tried it myself in one case and was shocked by how slow native Android layouting really is).
I think the way forward is to improve and standardize local webapps. But not sure how it could work out when every (established) platform has incentives against it...
I would say "be opinionated". Building something non-native that works on every platform looks like crap on every platform. And nothing is slower than the average Electron pile. I would say stack but pile seems more appropriate.
> As for content I'd rather read a PDF than a web site.
I'm not a fan of PDFs for content because they're very "static" in that they're really meant to be printed than read on screen.
If i had to pick a favorite format/container that'd be CHM - which is essentially a self-contained offline "web site" with table of contents, search, index and only whatever web tech was available in IE in 1998 or so (which is still more than enough to hang yourself with, but due to the focus on actually being all about a text format, 99.9% of CHM files restrained themselves to basic HTML), which allows for screen-based reading and dynamic layouts (mainly resizing the font, window, etc) and pixel-perfect images.
Though note that i'm using CHM as a "category", e.g. i'd also put Qt's help system, JavaHelp and even GNU info (not to be confused with Texinfo) in the same category (though info is more annoying with its hardwrapped lines, monospace text, use of titles as page names that must be unique and hacked-in support for images that most viewers do not even support).
I've got no idea how bad or good the format is, but it seems to work quite well for what I've used it, better than PDF in allowing reflow/dynamic oage sizes, but still being a kind of self-contained static web site with search, ToC and index.
Yes, apart from the web existing in a capitalist society which in turn causes the ad and fad (IA, crypto, VR, etc) problems, a fundamental thing that makes the web worse today is that its usage (way more so than its tech) has evolved from a very solid document distribution system to a somewhat poor a application platform.
Projects like Gemini [1] try to tackle this by reinventing a simpler, document/content focused protocol, but let's be honest it has no chance of really succeeding.
However, I really don't think PDF is the right way. PDF is a horrible format, only good for what it was designed to do: printing to paper. On screen, PDF is incapable of producing free-flowing resizable text for example (and I'll add that nowadays, even for printing PDF is not necessarily the best choice, you can do very advanced clean layout using web tech with Paged.js [2] for example). Plain old simple web formatting like is used in the ePub format is generally more than enough for what would be a PDF.
I would speak to many more people regarding how they read things and you will find outside the tech industry fixed formats are king and there is no sign this is going to ever go away. Academia, education, business and finance included at least in my case.
Bar the GitHub markdown and inevitable confluence in tech, I don’t see this anywhere else. It’s Word, people writing fixed size pages on their iPads and consuming vast amounts of physical documents. In fact when it comes to technical publishing, dynamic layouts almost always fall to pieces.
PDF, or at least the less Adobe subset that falls out of typesetting software, while not ideal is the least bad interchange format we have for this.
The only close thing I see is ebooks but I hear regular complaints appear from people who lose the concept of “page” when using those.
Gemini I am interested in and will research further.
Yes, Mozilla's behavior is increasingly worrying. As mostly everyone here I presume I'm eager for the Ladybird project [1] to release their browser and have very I hope about it. In the meantime I'm stuck with a day-by-day degrading Firefox, the degrading speed being mitigated by Debian stable packaging speed in my case, which is at least something.
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?
[1] https://ladybird.org/
I had a look at pale moon out of curiosity. Here's what a new install looks like: https://imgur.com/a/f5FqOsO
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.
The UI reminds me a lot of old versions of Firefox for Mac
Honestly this is almost how Firefox feels to me compared to Chrome/Brave.
This is ridiculous. What exactly does Chrome do that Firefox doesn't?
I have a lot of problems with Chrome, especially recently but I really don’t like the firefox UX. I can’t remember exactly now but I gave it another try about a year ago and there were so many annoying inconsistencies. Profile UX is basically not even there. Do they still do their own custom janky scrolling? Devtools is clunky and slow. There were definitely more problems too.
I’m very happy with Brave with all its silly ads/crypto/news things turned off.
chrome does ublock do not work?
I don't think they really have a chance if I'm honest.
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...)
Well, if Apple really wanted to do more, they would have implemented new APIs sooner and be in sync with Chrome and Firefox regarding features they support. (Currently Safari is often 1 year late in supporting lastest features.) I would not count on them.
I take it you disagree with the thesis of the article, which is that new features are a thing we need less of, as they’re being used to preclude the possibility of competition with the dominant browsers.
I think websites will adopt WEI/attestation or forced login (probably with Google), blocking out any non-Chrome-family browser, faster than Firefox degrades.
Care to share reasons why would you think this?
To deal with bots that are increasingly good at evading bot detection and to track user data, made possible because we let an ad and tracking company control the technology for over ninety percent of browsers.
I've used pale moon for years, but slowly faded back to firefox caused by the increasing websites that doesn't work with it. In this moment I've started a update and will try it again.
This is probably a dumb question, but are any of the Firefox forks (IceCat, LibreWolf, Pale Moon) particularly reassuring with regard to security? I know the article calls it "fear, uncertainty, and doubt", but the browser is the only part of my computer that regularly downloads and executes untrusted code.
All my hopes are resting on Ladybird now.
What about Zen Browser? https://zen-browser.app/
I don’t want to spread FUD and it’s a really honest question but I always wonder who are behind such huge projects. The web site looks great, and forking must be a full time job.
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.
Huh, my ISP blocks that address, apparently because they think it is harmful. Presumably a false positive.
What about servo/verso?
From my perspective, the web is fine from a technological standpoint.
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!"?
I'm not sure that content exists any more in any reasonable quantity. Occasionally a video will pop out which is interesting from someone but generally it's all below average. The attention dynamics have focused all content onto retaining viewers and reinforcement metrics around that. This normalised everything into mediocrity and delivering longer content with no meat.
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
just look for people who don't care about viewer retention?
I've been having good luck with RSS and https://search.marginalia.nu
I also make heavy use of RSS. That's how I find basically everything I read and view.
I feel a lot of content creators moved to videos or podcasts, I think cause that's easier to monetizes, but there seems to be _a lot_ of cool and interesting things being put on the web these days.
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.
Do you have a link to that podcast?
this one https://open.spotify.com/show/6QrdBI77Kwg5rFjQwaeByQ
it's in italian tho
It's a bit lazy of me, but let others submit links to each update to a website, and then another group of users up vote the content, and then I use that website to find such content. I could curate such content myself, but I would still need some sort of an algorithm to surface the truly quality content from the morass of updates.
I like that the author holds out hope that alternatives will continue to challenge corporate dominance
Depending on the websites you usually browse, Dillo or Netsurf could be enough. But if you need to deal with online banking or government services - time to open "real" browser.
Amen.
I know it’s hard to notice when you’re in it, but the good points here are buried behind a mountain of nostalgia. The problem with the internet is not that it uses too many JS frameworks. The fact that you used a company’s website one time that’s broken is a function of capitalism, not React. There has never been a better time for the diversity and capability of websites in general, again excepting the monopolization of social media niches by big corporations driven by Display Ad money. Interested developers—and laypeople!-can do way more with way less, and it’s likely to look good while they’re doing it.
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!
Creating a new browser from scratch is hard primarily because CSS 2.1 is not well defined in the specifications. I’ll keep repeating it until others catch on and read it for themselves.
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.
Sometimes i think i'm crazy of see this happened and does not rejected this, long time ago, rembering compiling Phoenix alpha (the first fork) and think oh-my-god now we have hopped of the internet does not be only ie only, 2-3 years after i see chrome launch directly in an google offices and think cool, now we have 4 major browser, and the old web drama it's be over, finnaly i can put the old erps and pos system and does not need install and versions bugs.
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 :(
It was an exchange of one kind of drama until another group got into power and then instated their own approved drama, for sure.
I had a great conversation about this the other day with a bunch of strangers- we all shared the exact same early 00's internet experience and were all reminiscing about those halcyon days
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?
Gemini gave me a LJ vibe last time I checked it out.
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.
LiveJournal of course famously got sent on a long march to Russia because a group of photographers didn't like that they were using their photos while having an active moderation team.
Did 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.
Apologies for the rant in advance. The web is horrible these days and I hate it. I'm in favour of making it not only boring but simpler.
Native apps are still the best end user experience by far, have the highest performance, consistency and the least memory and resource footprint. They are by nature local-first. That isn't a shocking new concept which is promoted suddenly as if it's a new discovery. It was the default since personal computing appeared. I know this is the wrong place to shoot web apps what with the prevalence of SaaS companies and startups (hell I work for one) but it's just an awful existence at the moment for customers who are held prisoner rather than served because it's more convenient for the supplier.
As for content I'd rather read a PDF than a web site. The web sites have become a tiny window of content with bad typography and colours in the middle of a sea of decorative excrement and subscription threats. The peak for me would be an RSS feed of PDFs which I can open in Preview on my Mac. Gopher was as close to reality as that ever got.
HN is a notable exception I will add but that is because it entirely, and ironically considering the principal users, rejects most of the insanity.
Circling back round to the article, remove most of the pile of hacks and we will have a proliferation of vendors because it isn't a moonshot building another browser.
I can definitely agree with the local first native apps. I started learning dart/flutter for this reason, so I can use one code base across multiple platforms, but I get the impression you'd likely not agree with my choice.
I do disagree about the web being poor for content though. Properly done it is way better than PDFs. Provided it's simple and clean.
I have no problem what language or stack you use as long as you only compile it once, not every time you click something. There are energy and memory savings to be made :)
It's definitely not better for content. It's impossible to reference easily, everything is transient and ephemeral, layouts differ all over the place, there is no concept of location other than anchors which are poorly defined, typography is "variable" and goes somewhere from hooky to crack smoking, still to this day half of the images are rasters, it's near impossible to save bits of it locally if you want to keep it, it's difficult to print and importantly the moment you add something dynamic to it you multiply the damage by 10x for all of the above.
If you're talking simple content, text and images, and you're not trying to do "clever" stuff like making fancy transitions or anything that involves oodles of JavaScript then I can't see how the web isn't on par with pdf. I'd say it's better.
I hate modern sites where you need JavaScript to load text and images.
My issue with pdf is it's a shit show behind the scenes.
I think you've captured a frustration that a lot of people share about the current state of the web
Pure native apps are simply not economical anymore. And what platform do you even mean? Windows? Mac? iOS? Android? Linux?! KDE or Gnome?!?!
And somehow UWP apps manage to be even more sluggish and resource-hogging than webapps despite being "native". Native Android SDK apps aren't faster than webapps either if you exactly match the layout (tried it myself in one case and was shocked by how slow native Android layouting really is).
I think the way forward is to improve and standardize local webapps. But not sure how it could work out when every (established) platform has incentives against it...
I would say "be opinionated". Building something non-native that works on every platform looks like crap on every platform. And nothing is slower than the average Electron pile. I would say stack but pile seems more appropriate.
> As for content I'd rather read a PDF than a web site.
I'm not a fan of PDFs for content because they're very "static" in that they're really meant to be printed than read on screen.
If i had to pick a favorite format/container that'd be CHM - which is essentially a self-contained offline "web site" with table of contents, search, index and only whatever web tech was available in IE in 1998 or so (which is still more than enough to hang yourself with, but due to the focus on actually being all about a text format, 99.9% of CHM files restrained themselves to basic HTML), which allows for screen-based reading and dynamic layouts (mainly resizing the font, window, etc) and pixel-perfect images.
Though note that i'm using CHM as a "category", e.g. i'd also put Qt's help system, JavaHelp and even GNU info (not to be confused with Texinfo) in the same category (though info is more annoying with its hardwrapped lines, monospace text, use of titles as page names that must be unique and hacked-in support for images that most viewers do not even support).
how about epub?
I've got no idea how bad or good the format is, but it seems to work quite well for what I've used it, better than PDF in allowing reflow/dynamic oage sizes, but still being a kind of self-contained static web site with search, ToC and index.
This is not a terrible idea actually. Although PDFs can have structured table of contents :)
Yes, apart from the web existing in a capitalist society which in turn causes the ad and fad (IA, crypto, VR, etc) problems, a fundamental thing that makes the web worse today is that its usage (way more so than its tech) has evolved from a very solid document distribution system to a somewhat poor a application platform.
Projects like Gemini [1] try to tackle this by reinventing a simpler, document/content focused protocol, but let's be honest it has no chance of really succeeding.
However, I really don't think PDF is the right way. PDF is a horrible format, only good for what it was designed to do: printing to paper. On screen, PDF is incapable of producing free-flowing resizable text for example (and I'll add that nowadays, even for printing PDF is not necessarily the best choice, you can do very advanced clean layout using web tech with Paged.js [2] for example). Plain old simple web formatting like is used in the ePub format is generally more than enough for what would be a PDF.
[1] https://geminiprotocol.net/
[2] https://pagedjs.org/
I would speak to many more people regarding how they read things and you will find outside the tech industry fixed formats are king and there is no sign this is going to ever go away. Academia, education, business and finance included at least in my case.
Bar the GitHub markdown and inevitable confluence in tech, I don’t see this anywhere else. It’s Word, people writing fixed size pages on their iPads and consuming vast amounts of physical documents. In fact when it comes to technical publishing, dynamic layouts almost always fall to pieces.
PDF, or at least the less Adobe subset that falls out of typesetting software, while not ideal is the least bad interchange format we have for this.
The only close thing I see is ebooks but I hear regular complaints appear from people who lose the concept of “page” when using those.
Gemini I am interested in and will research further.
> not only boring but simpler
have you tried Gemini?
Not yet but after a quick search, it really piques my interest! Thanks for the pointer.