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from the things-expand-to-exceed-the-space-provided dept.
A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were readable, as were pages by academics who hadn't updated the styling on their website since 1995. But very few commercial websites were usable (other than Google). When I measured my connection, I found that the bandwidth was roughly comparable to what I got with a 56k modem in the 90s. The latency and packetloss were significantly worse than the average day on dialup: latency varied between 500ms and 1000ms and packetloss varied between 1% and 10%. Those numbers are comparable to what I'd see on dialup on a bad day.
Despite my connection being only a bit worse than it was in the 90s, the vast majority of the web wouldn't load. Why shouldn't the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? It would be one thing if I tried to watch youtube and read pinterest. It's hard to serve videos and images without bandwidth. But my online interests are quite boring from a media standpoint. Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. In fact, I recently tried using w3m (a terminal-based web browser that, by default, doesn't support css, javascript, or even images) for a week and it turns out there are only two websites I regularly visit that don't really work in w3m (twitter and zulip, both fundamentally text based sites, at least as I use them)[1].
More recently, I was reminded of how poorly the web works for people on slow connections when I tried to read a joelonsoftware post while using a flaky mobile connection. The HTML loaded but either one of the five CSS requests or one of the thirteen javascript requests timed out, leaving me with a broken page. Instead of seeing the article, I saw three entire pages of sidebar, menu, and ads before getting to the title because the page required some kind of layout modification to display reasonably. Pages are often designed so that they're hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it's quite common for at least one depedency to fail. After refreshing the page twice, the page loaded as it was supposed to and I was able to read the blog post, a fairly compelling post on eliminating dependencies.
[1] excluding internal Microsoft stuff that's required for work. Many of the sites are IE only and don't even work in edge. I didn't try those sites in w3m but I doubt they'd work! In fact, I doubt that even half of the non-IE specific internal sites would work in w3m.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @08:17PM (9 children)
And WHAT, specifically, is the purpose of that - EXCEPT running unapproved code on user's computer?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Monday September 16 2019, @08:20PM (8 children)
It means you don't have to develop and deploy five different versions of an application, one for each major desktop and mobile operating system, and you don't have to have a platform curator (such as Apple) approve them before they go out to the public.
Unapproved by whom? And on what basis does this person ordinarily approve code?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @08:38PM (7 children)
Have you used a non-Chromium-based browser on a non-Windows, non-Linux OS lately? Websites don't work well, (rapidly-changing) standards be damned.
We haven't achieved write-once, read-anywhere. Instead we're returning to a monoculture.
Except this time Google is the gatekeeper.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Pino P on Monday September 16 2019, @08:43PM (2 children)
I regularly use Firefox for X11/Linux and Firefox for Android.
No, I don't regularly use an Apple device. Which OS did you have in mind?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @09:39PM
Forgot Apple was technically BSD-derivative, even though I was thinking about BSDs specifically.
I've found that almost all sites with CAPTCHAs require me to do Google's homework by default, and many even refuse to serve me the CAPTCHA. This behavior goes away if I switch to a Google-owned browser.
It's also interesting that in my mind Firefox is so deeply in Google's pockets that I forget they still have a different back-end.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday September 16 2019, @11:11PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday September 16 2019, @08:52PM (3 children)
I seem to recall this problem getting "solved" once. Sun's would develop the JVM that provides a unified platform for all developers to program against. From remote control to super computer, it would all supposedly run the same code without refactoring. Thus, Java, the second most hated programming language was born.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday September 16 2019, @08:56PM (1 child)
Two things make WebAssembly different from Java: a C-like memory model for a wider variety of source languages, and lack of legal encumbrance by One Rich American Called Larry Ellison.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 16 2019, @09:06PM
Well, but Java was originally the province of Sun. So being once owned by someone with reasonable ethics isn't proof of what will happen. And Java-the-language (including the parts call Jakarta) is being released into the open source (possible Free Software) world, with Oracle only holding onto the trademarks.
I still don't like Java because of the limited data types (I really use uint64 a lot), and that you can't do much with them, not even store them in maps. Only Objects can be stored. And I despise utf-16 as worse for all purposes (except interfacing with MS) that utf-8 and utf-32. And byte aligned structs are very useful. And...
But you still need to be fair.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday September 16 2019, @11:01PM
At *least* twice. The UCSD P-system [wikipedia.org] existed long before the crapware called Java.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr