The 49MB Web Page

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thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit

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Unless the user is actively navigating, the header is dead weight. The header should hide on scrollDown and reveal on scrollUp. Let the content breathe.

This one I actually hate. Often I just want to scroll up a few pixels, either to satisfy a mild compulsion or to align the content so I can see most of it. This is completely ruined if the navbar pops back in. Leave it at the top of the page, where it belongs, not at the top of the viewport!

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It really depends on the site for me.

What I really hate is a table that’s multiple scrolls long where the header row doesn’t follow.

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IMO the header should stay at the top as part of the page. I know where it is, I’ll scroll up to it if I need to.

Like you, I find a header appearing and hiding quite difficult in specific circumstances.

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100%. i like using the top of the screen to mark my place in reading. sometimes i need to scroll back up and these headers completely fuck up my reading experience.

but luckily Reader View exists, so i usually just use that.

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I feel your pain. The really good ones plan for this, some pop up immediately when you scroll up and that sucks. The proper thing to do (imo) is to wait for the user to scroll 80% of the viewport back up, only then letting it begin to slide in, and have it slide in at a rate 1/2 of the page scroll. I do like having it easily available, but it should feel like it’s trying to stay out of the way.

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The iOS browser has always supported “tap the top of the viewport to scroll all the way up,” which largely allows for what you say: just leave the nav way up there. Last time I looked was years ago, and Android Chrome didn’t did this. Does it now?

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The iOS browser has always supported “tap the top of the viewport to scroll all the way up,”

And almost every actual PC has a ‘home’ key on the keyboard which does the same … unless the website has scripts that hijack it.

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Even if it did, how would any user ever find out about this obscure feature?

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It’s not obscure. It’s core. Apple has this entire UI philosophy called “revealed power” which is about the UI not having a big button for everything necessarily, and letting the user discover added layers of functionality as they go on. This keeps the UI simple in the beginning, or for people who always need simplicity, but allows others to discover more in time. You don’t have to like it but it’s very intentional.

What’s “discoverable” is also relative. I was on a PC today struggling to figure out how to do something. Eventually I tried double clicking the element in question and that finally worked. I thought wow I don’t use PCs much anymore because double clicking hardly even occurs to me anymore. Can you tell me how any user ever finds out that you need to double click an icon on their desktop? Seems obvious, but there is no label or visible indication that this is what you should do. You’re thinking pshaw that’s obvious, but how did you learn? I’d be very surprised if you can remember.

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Can you tell me how any user ever finds out that you need to double click an icon on their desktop?

I completely agree with you on this. I hate that Windows doesn’t disclose what areas can be clicked anymore. It used to, back when computers where new. Nowadays if you wanted to show a new person how to use a computer, you’d have to very explicitly explain things that would’ve been obvious from the looks just 10 years ago. (Ok, maybe 15.)

What is a new Apple user supposed to do? Try all of the 30-ish gestures one can make on every side and every corner of every app? That’s just stupid.

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I explained this above but their design philosophy is that a user shouldn’t be overwhelmed with every possible function on day 1, nor will they have advanced needs on day 1 like “how can I more quickly scroll to the top to reveal a navbar.”

The idea is to make what’s most needed most visible, and tuck more advanced functions out of the way of basic ones. Then users will discover them over time, either by accident, experimentation, from a friend, or reading tip lists off the internet…

Now if this is a conversation in good faith, you won’t immediately say “so they expect everyone to learn everything by reading tip sheets off the internet??”

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At the same time, it needs to be comfortably thin.

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I have this usercss:

[data-testid="header"],
[data-mobile-fixed="1"],
[data-remove-fixed="0"] {
  position: absolute !important;
  width: 100%;
}
main { padding-top: 2rem !important; }

Works well enough on most sites. And on those it doesn’t, you can easily exclude.

Can likely be expanded, but adding just header broke more than it fixed.

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I like it at the top of the view-port, but I agree the auto-hiding/showing feature is excruciating.

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I have said it before, and I’ll say it again.

An adblocker is part on my security suite on my computer.

Ads can be hijacked to spread malware, and unless the site owner agrees to take both financial and legal liability for the possible dammage caused by their website I will never consider removing my adblocker.

If they agreed to take on the responsibility, I still wouldn’t remove my adblocker, but I would consider it.

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I mean, even CIA recommends the use of an adblocker for personal cybersecurity. And one or two other US agencies too.

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The FBI too recommends adblockers as part of general web browsing security.

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On top of three letter agencies, basically every cybersecurity expert that publishes a “basic tweaks” article recommends uBlock Origin.

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What’s your preferred adblocker?

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Ublock origin does a pretty solid job, I’m always mildly horrified when I have to use a browser without it. Is that really what other people see when they browse the web?

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Yes. Average people don’t know what an adblocker is or even that there are different browsers. Let alone know how to install an extension. We’re fucked

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uBlock Origin is the gold standard, but you need something that supports the full version. Plain Chrome (and most forks) are not good enough.

Firefox, Helium, and/or Orion would be my top picks.

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lynx

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This is basically the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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Better?

https://dillo.org/

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I don’t understand how this serves the purpose of ad blocking.

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taps temple

Ads won’t load if browser literally can’t load em.

Dillo is not a daily driver…but it is occasionally fun to pilot. Breaks on a lot of sites tho…but god damn is it a nice little browser.

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uBlock Origin

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Block Site - Whitelist mode

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I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?

I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.

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It is mostly because the bar is measured in time to display content (forgot the name of the metric)

So the huge about of bullshit gets hidden by fast internet and asynchronous jobs.

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I think it’s “First paint” or something like that.

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Ironically somehow AI is making disabling JS better nowadays, because text/markdown is becoming normalized, so receiving a pure text version of a page is a thing again.

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How did this get normalized?

The average user doesn’t know or understand technical details, and don’t believe they have any power to change anything

Also capitalism means a small number of assholes make most of the decisions for reasons that benefit them

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Just like the bad old days, when entire sites were made in Flash and Linux users were shafted. Ridiculous.

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It makes me glad for having been born when I was. I am a younger Millennial, so I wasn’t online for the early internet, but I am old enough that when I read this blog post, it reminds me that I have seen firsthand that it wasn’t always this bad — even if, like you, I was surprised to realise how bad things have gotten. I feel like a frog boiling in water that started cool, but gradually became hotter^[1]

I feel sorry for Zoomers and younger, who have grown up only knowing the walked gardens of big tech. It invokes an odd sense of ethical duty in me; many of them believe they hate tech in all its forms, because all they know is the toxic cycle of dark patterns and a culture that expects them to be always contactable, making it hard to disengage. However, there’s an entire world that they don’t know that beyond the walled garden. I wish I could show them what I have seen, but you can’t easily convey the magic of a memory — after all, the internet that shaped me no longer exists.

So I guess the challenge ahead of me is trying to figure out how I can work with them to co-create a vision of a better internet. We can’t put all the enshittification and spambots back in Pandora’s box, but maybe we can build something new if people like us can use our memories to distribute hope to where it’s needed.

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You say “after all, the Internet that shaped me no longer exists.”

In a way, that’s true, but the reality is that most of it is still there; it’s just dwarfed by what came after.

I can still log on to mume.org and play on a Middle Earth-based MUD. I can still connect to IRC.

FirstClass BBSes, Hermes BBSes, Hotline servers and trackers, a plethora of self-hosted HTTP1.0 compliant sites, Gopher servers, FTP sites, and more.

The only real victim that I can think of is Usenet; AIM servers are back again, as are ICQ servers, shoutcast servers and battle.net servers.

Dialup is gone, but people have built TCP wrappers so all the old dialup stuff can be used over the Internet. You can even run the operating systems and software packages just the way they were in 1979 (or the year of your choice).

The callenge is finding all that when your phone and computer do all they can to direct you to Instagram, Tiktok and Temu, and system defaults use add on technology that has only existed for a decade max.

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I do agree that there is much that remains. Indeed, I have found a lot of joy by discovering all the weird little personal websites that people are building as an act of rebellion. However, the culture has irrevocably changed. It makes me think of the line “man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man”.

Many of us who grew up on a more free and chaotic internet have become jaded over time. If I went back in time, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the internet in the same way I used to because I’d be too acutely aware of what lies ahead. That’s why I prefer to focus on moving forwards — it feels like a kind of healing

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Obligatory: https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/

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I prefer http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ because it doesn’t think it knows better than I do what width I want my window to be.

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he/him

From Website Carbon:

a screenshot from a web site that checks the carbon footprint of a page load on another web site; it says "A+ Website carbon results for: perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com Hurrah! This web page achieves a carbon rating of A+ This is cleaner than 100% of all web pages globally"

Nice! Less than 0.01g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page.

Holy shit! That web site lives up to its name! I want to redesign my site to be that fast and elegant.

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Yeah I’m not convinced that this site is accurate. According to this my blog pollutes more than facebook . com (I’m apparently as dirty as netflix . com) and is only slightly dirtier than newyorktimes . com… And images . google . com gets an A… I ain’t buying it.

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If you miss how the web was before everything became Plattform, this might be a good place to drop kagis small web initiative: https://kagi.com/smallweb

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Meanwhile people out here hosting websites on disposable vapes.

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It’s not all that impressive if you’re familiar with microcontrollers. Running a webstack doesn’t require much compute power.

I want to know if it can run Doom.

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Sort of, it’s just short on internal memory so they mostly render on PC to the screen on the vape.

https://youtu.be/rVsvtEj9iqE

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So no, it can’t run Doom.

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One php command can be a server. It’s how you can easily test run a website.

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On the topic of load time, it didn’t even mention the compulsory “prove you are human” Cloudflare gate on practically every website these days. Add 10 seconds to every visit.

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Let’s go back to gopher?

Read the guardian over the gopher protocol at my gopher hole:

gopher://theunixzoo.co.uk/the-guardian

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Thank you for this, it makes for a nicer reading experience than their own website! Is the code open source by any chance?

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Good to hear.

I’ve not released it because I hacked it up very quickly.

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“Why do people not read articles anymore and just go by what the headline says?”

The articles people are supposed to read:

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Pretty ironic this blog runs multiple scripts that get blocked by ublock origin

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They seem to be for goatcounter, an “Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data.” and cloudflare insights.

The entire blog post is still just 750kB in total.

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That was a great read. I have worked at companies that lived on display ads and it’s a terrible, desperate business to be in. Personally I think branded display ads have always had zero value (or even negative value) and the better the net has gotten at tracking their value, the more this has come to light, the less advertisers are willing to pay, and therefore the more fuckery publishers engage in to try to survive. It’s extremely hard or impossible to deliver a good user experience under this set of incentives.

Thinking back to the print news era, a lot of the ads were local, which made them much more valuable. But now the net has snuffed out local retail too, so that model isn’t even there to fall back on if we tried.

I’m grateful now to be working somewhere that doesn’t survive on display ads, and that may be one of the big reasons I’ve stuck with this employer for almost a decade now.

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I purchased Ad Guard for my Android phone seven or eight years ago and it’s a game changer. I despise ads and it’s jarring to use someone else’s phone.

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Btw, anyone has a example of a tracking canvas in html? Wouldn’t it falsify the results, if you resize it via a userstyle?

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Funny enough, most JS-only sites (those who are empty with JS disabled) display fine on Dillo.

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Comments in Privacy@lemmy.ml

Great article, thanks for sharing!

I was just discussing something along these lines with a friend. Back when dial-up was was king, I went to an info expo where they were displaying broadband. I typed in my email host’s website, and when I pressed enter, the page just clicked in. No vertical loading whatsoever. It was the future!

Funny to see twenty-odd years later we are stuck in the same throttling ecperience us dial-up users had to experience organically. I really hope a new web is in the brewing. Corpo greed is so fucking cruel.

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Funny to see twenty-odd years later we are stuck in the same throttling ecperience us dial-up users had to experience organically.

Moore’s law. “Every 18 months, the number of transistors on a chip doubles.”

Gates’ Law. “Every 18 months, the speed of software is cut in half.”

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what a shit show

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These articles are always a joy, not just because they always load and display nicely. Even if I’m not in the field myself, this one was helpful even to a technical level, diagnosed the larger issue and showcased it well, well worth sharing to many people.

I only wonder how all this dark design on the web interacts with accessibility.

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I don’t watch news any more. I don’t like this world has gone too far.

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Comments in Technology@beehaw.org

Stupid stuff like this is the reason I use Ublock-Origin. Before that I used to use Umatrix when it was maintained. I blocked just about everything and had countless rules for my most visited websites so idiotic stuff wouldn’t load.

Nowaways, I block 3rd party frames and call it a day. If my connection is slow I can block pictures, javascript and 3rd party bloat to reduce bandwidth and browse basic sites.

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There was a scene in Law & Order decades ago where Jerry Orbach’s character, investigating a murder scene, makes the wry comment, “Oh, suspenders and a belt” after noting a diaphragm and condom wrapper on the nightstand.

uBO is great, but it’s not a complete prophylactic. NoScript also ends endless ads loading. A pihole can handle things at the network level. There are numerous ways to maintain internet hygiene that most people don’t realize exist, because it’s not profitable to give people control over their own devices, so those of us on Firefox (or a derivative) and several extensions are characterized as “crooks who want to steal the internet.”

As with politicians, each accusation is an admission.

Ad companies: “I want to use the vast majority of the data allocation you pay for.”

Me: “No.”

Ad companies: “THIEF!!!!!!!!!!!!”

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ubo has a button to disable javascript. For news pages that tends to be the easiest way to make them barely usable.

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And if you have a limited data mobile plan, they are just eating your money

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All mobile plans are limited, at least in the U.S. Even “unlimited” plans will revert to dial-up speeds once advertisers have stolen enough of your data.

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I want a browser that is text only like lynx but with tabs and extensions. The modern web is fucking awful and its lazy slop and will only get worse.

I dont need 400mb of fonts and a 200mb background photo of someone laughing at nothing looking into blank space. I want the fucking info.

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That’s why some people created the Gemini protocol… And then came Google and used the same fucking name for it’s bloody AI.

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I love gemini proto, i wish more stuff was on it. Fuck google :/

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I enjoy using elinks but it might be too restrictive still.

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Just use Lynx/Links in your console?

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I do but i want more from it

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Your console has tabs if it’s a modern console.

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Yeah i do use tmux as well, i can make it happen but making it pop a new tab from a link for instance wont work

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Even with ublock-origin with quite extensive blocking rules and browsers enhanced tracking protection the ny times website was 10 MB to load.

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We have gotten so bloated and lazy.
Some rich idiot who has never heard of limits buys in and then says who needs optimization, everyone has all the resources they do, dont they? And if thy dont they should buy in so that more money is spent.

Finite is such an impossible thought for some people the same way infinite is.

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I tried out replit to just make a web page showing a nice indexed list of static files. Whatever it came out with was 300MB

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Look at a few electron apps and you’ll find your answer. A resounding yes.

At this rate, I’ve found myself vibe coding simple apps rather than downloading them or looking for web tools.

Example: my wife needed a bunch of qr codes. Everything online was shitty bloat with tracking. 10min and I’d built and tested the Python, another 5 and I’d already had it wrapped on an eye wrapper for her.

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