Making the Web Boring Again

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/

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.

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!

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!"?

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.

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.

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?

Amen.