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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @08:57PM
The bloat has been getting increasingly worse for at least a decade. It won't solve things, but adding uBlock Origin and NoScript to your browser helps some.
(Score: 3, Funny) by srobert on Monday September 16 2019, @09:08PM (5 children)
What can we add to make it less bloated?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @09:11PM (1 child)
A memory leaking Adblocker.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 16 2019, @10:42PM
Norton AD Blocker for Linux. Download the trial three DVD set for free.
(Score: 1) by jurov on Monday September 16 2019, @11:19PM (1 child)
uMatrix for Firefox allows you to selectively enable javascript and other web (mis)features. It is not trivial, sometimes you have to repeat unblock and refresh several times.
But for requently visited sites it does save time and blocks annoying popups.
There's also NoScript which is somewhat easier to use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 17 2019, @04:52AM
You can turn on "I am an advanced user" in uBlock and do much the same thing. In different ways, it is simultaneously more and less powerful than uMatrix.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Tuesday September 17 2019, @02:44AM
A pi-hole?
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday September 16 2019, @11:31PM
JS is an incredibly dynamic language. Any variable can be literally anything, defined anywhere. And of course libraries can come from anywhere, potentially not even really available on the local server prior to browser execution because you know how that marketing tracker needs to know the page has been hit.
All that is in some ways extremely convenient for developers who want to copy some whizbang from somebody's public and permissively licensed Github or something, but has the problem of making it extremely difficult to trace execution of code from all possible user inputs and server-side conditions in response to AJAX calls. Which means that the 15Kb thingamabob that you're really only using 1Kb of, which in turn relies on 3 other libraries that come in at 2 Mb each but you really only need a few functions from each of them, and those libraries rely on several more Mb of libraries even though those aren't really needed for the original thingamabob but it says in the documentation you need them and the libraries check for the existence of the other libraries ...
The upshot is that until there's a consistent and easy way to prune JS on the server side to what's actually needed (and cache the pruned version of course so this only needs to be done after a code update), we're going to continue to see ever-increasing JS bloat. After all, for nearly all organizations, their developer time is more valuable than your CPU time.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Tuesday September 17 2019, @12:15AM (3 children)
The reason everybody wants it is because the farther away one gets from text, the less defenses consumer brain has. It is relatively easy to read text critically, while it is next to impossible to critically watch a page loaded with sounds and videos. They know it and they do anything they could to remove the option of getting simple news and as a text.
This explains why presumably intellectual coastal people voted Clinton, while fly over folks voted Trump. Midwest folks don't have their brains washed that clean; not yet anyway. As per democrats, they have no clue whatsoever. They washed their own brains clean and flat. If Obama wanted Hilary to win, the only thing he'd need is a fast internet everywhere.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Tuesday September 17 2019, @12:38AM (2 children)
There are various readers that let you read the entries without UN compressing them.
Get rid of the cruft (images, social media, etc) and we could probably download most of the relevant parts of the English internet and store it locally.
Of course, nobody wants that. Even W3 has stopped hosting copies of the complete HTML and cas specs for download - you have to use their shitty website.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday September 17 2019, @12:48AM
For example, no google page has a print function. If one opens say an email and searches for "print" nothing would be found. They want us to eyeball the page looking for an icon, including whatver ads and/or other brainwashing. This is a company with search as a main business, mind you. I'd love to see a class action based on lost eyesight of users. They are evil pure and simple. They want to make morons out of people and rule.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 17 2019, @02:02PM
I use Kiwix its pretty good on my linux box. Amazing how many times I have had no network and needed wikipedia. To some people its like magic.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by rylyeh on Tuesday September 17 2019, @02:31AM
The bloat of the web is no different than the bloat of all digital media.
It grows as our tech grows, and the folks that sell us new stuff need us to junk our existing equipment and buy new stuff.
Audio, Video, and everything else included.
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Tuesday September 17 2019, @02:42AM
Try this same experiment with a pi-hole. It might actually be usable.
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