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Programmer Drew DeVault writes a blog post about conservative web development after poking at a few popular sites and finding that only 8% of the data downloaded among the megabytes of advertisements, scripts, and third-party scripts is actually related to content. This represents several usability problems. After walking through some of the more problematic symptoms he proposes several steps which can remediate the state of the web.
Today I turned off my ad blocker, enabled JavaScript, opened my network monitor, and clicked the first link on Hacker News - a New York Times article. It started by downloading a megabyte of data as it rendered the page over the course of eight full seconds. The page opens with an advertisement 281 pixels tall, placed before even the title of the article. As I scrolled down, more and more requests were made, downloading a total of 2.8 MB of data with 748 HTTP requests. An article was weaved between a grand total of 1419 vertical pixels of ad space, greater than the vertical resolution of my display. Another 153-pixel ad is shown at the bottom, after the article. Four of the ads were identical.
Aside: Opponents to javascript are often wrongfully framed as Luddites. However, I invite readers to connect the dots; see:
Exploiting Speculative Execution (Meltdown/Spectre) via JavaScript
Web cache poisoning just got real: How to fling evil code at victims
Rowhammer.js Is the Most Ingenious Hack I've Ever Seen and
Oh, great, now there's a SECOND remote Rowhammer exploit
[Ed note: SoylentNews is designed to use no Javascript for normal user interactions. (There are a few staff-accessible pages requiring it, such as the Story Editing page.) I don't know of anyone on staff who would seriously consider changing that. When this site was initially rolling out, we actually tested to make sure it would work on a text-only browser (Lynx) and even Mosaic! So, please enjoy your light-weight, performant web pages here!]
[TMB note: Except the "collapse/expand this whole damned thread" button.]
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:29PM (3 children)
One trick is to whitelist some things that you universally want to allow. Suppose if right under soylentnews.org, there were a long list of third party sites. And I ALWAYS want foobar.com to be allowed.
1. Click on the asterisk next to the soylentnews.org domain name in blue
2. Green-list foobar.com, now you'll never have to green list it again
3. Click save
4. Deselect the asterisk by clicking the domain name in blue
5. Now green-list any other things that are just for soylentnews.org (if there were no ad sites to banish would they make a sound?)
6. Slick save
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:12PM (1 child)
Thanks DannyB. Yeah, I pretty much figured that all out, but again, the UI wasn't immediately obvious to me. I have uMatrix installed, but not enabled at this time, and haven't used it in a couple of months. The thing I remember not grasping: the split upper and lower red / green- what's the significance of the upper versus lower?
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:38PM
Clicking the upper toggles between default and "full solid green".
The lower toggles between default and "full solid red".
That seems to be my experience.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:45PM
Umatrix is an improvement over this. By default it allows the current site to load css, images, javascript. By default it allows only css and images from third party sites. It shows what type of objects are being loaded and can temp allow or permanently allow or block. Which means that allowing JavaScript for google.com on google.com works, but doesn't allow their JS to run anywhere else by default.