Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999) (opens in new tab)

Nope, it only happens when something outside changed Firefox's files (in this case when Ubuntu swapped files because dpkg updated Firefox). This never happens* in Windows and macOS (it might nag, but you can definitely dismiss it). It seems that johnchristopher has a suggestion to disable auto-updates on a specific application in Debian and Ubuntu (haven't tested it though): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33202052

* At least using their official installers. I'm specifically excluding using Chocolatey/brew/other loose-file update mechanism or your bonkers enterprise solution insists on using loose files and not rely on *.msi/*.app/*.pkg.

Or maybe new features are still coming out in the W3C specs and need to be implemented. Did you know CSS now has a parent selector, or that JS will be getting functional piping soon?

Will not work with snap though.

The first time it happened, I would get rid of whatever software was involved in causing it and never use it again, except for testing purposes.

I completely agree with you about everything else too. The Web is mature enough that I can use a well-tested website with a 20-year-old browser.

There is no technical reason to not have a minimum-viable web browser with a smaller attack surface that doesn't need upgrades for months or even years.

And, in fact, such browsers exist, and I can browse most of the Web that I need with them. I just have to ignore the shitty mainstream, which I am more than happy to do.

And each update logs me out of my password manager

Worse, now this is happening to Thunderbird. Wasn't an issue until about a month ago. Now I need to re-install Thunderbird every few weeks because they've pushed an update.

When from my point of view, as a user, I haven't seen a new feature which I truly wanted in over 5 years, maybe more like 10.

It's a shame, really.

Push for silent updates, force upgrades, always on tracking, remote bricking, notarization, (corporate cartels) trusted networks, making things harder to open, harder to repair, authorization for everything all point toward control.

I believe another generation of hackers will emerge from this transition.

Then this thing starts becoming profitable in the sense of bringing street cred and money and new kind of people rush in with their new ideas how to use this new thing. These new people don't share the same ideas with the original believers but they know how to build machinery around it to make it profitable and appeal for the masses. The new thing that was supposed to change the world becomes a concentrated and optimised version of the things before it.

The believers then become bitter purists and try to fight the new order by disowning the current technologies or methods and cater for the niche hipster elitist circles when the rest continues do their thing.

You can see it in everything, you can see it in printing press you can see it in Radio, you can see it in TV, you can see it in things that are not media: cars, clothing, shaving, coffee - everything.

Things don't become worse, they just become mainstream and that mass adoption is run not by purists but by people with no regard to the original ideals of the technology and masses love it this way and stays this way until its made obsolete by something else.

For a chuckle try running old software on a modern computer (fire up dos box and run WordPerfect or something) and be amazed at the speed of the thing. that is why we built a faster computer :)

In a more practical way though, some new things are good, some new thing are bad. It makes sense to adopt good stuff and cut off the bad. Deck? Mostly good. Requiring phone number to play a game? Bad. Naturally, it is a very subjective process and we are bound to disagree on details.

Not that long ago a family member tried to use the same argument used here ( its a generational thing; old people just hate new stuff ) when trying to convince that Venmo is actually good as I was trying to gently indicate that maybe a payment system that by default announces to the world[1] I just spent X on Y may not be the best thing since sliced bread. Working near that space I was amused, but each to their own ( and I certainly am not going to tell the guy how to raise his kids ).

[1]https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/venmo-explains-why-transac...

"Who knows whether a new version will be available and usable when the current one stops working?"

With SaaS products the company can go out of business; they can change the product on you without your opt-in, making it unusable (or less usable) for your purposes and there is no way to downgrade to the previous version; they can stop supporting your web browser; your account can get disabled or compromised; new policies and regulations on data retention and privacy could render a particular SaaS product unusable for your purposes.

What are you meant to do if a SaaS tool you depend on suddenly stops working? How do you install the old version and get back to work?

In other words, the criticism is fair but the solution of attempting to freeze time or even try to go back is not right. Sometimes though, when things get very bad going back to the basics and re-do everything can work.

For things like security patches, pushing updates has been a net positive IMO.

For absolutely everything else, it's a disaster. I always used to think that the "free software purists" were a bit too radical for my tastes ... but now, in the era of SaaS, I find myself agreeing with them. I want to own and be in control of my hardware and software. Let me decide if upgrading is worth it.

Certainly a reasonable choice on your part. We all want what we want.

I have a friend who, when he goes grocery shopping, grabs the first item he sees from each of the items on his list. As far as I can determine, this is without regard to price, quality, or any other factor.

In my comment, I was thinking of the context of links I click to from HN.

But it also works when searching for information. When I close the tab of an unfriendly site, which, remember, likely has lower-quality information than an accessible one, I am immediately freeing myself to click the next link in the search results and get my information from an accessible site with higher-quality content.

Given the disparity of the quality of content, it is quite likely that I would have ended up at the latter site anyway.

Unless it's a personal site/blog I typically open a site to find information I came for, and close it as soon as that task is done. Anything that makes this take longer than it needs to gets blocked. Sites should strive to stay open for as few seconds/minutes as possible while still giving me the requested information.

Regarding text/image-focused sites that require JS: I generally find sites made by people who haven't figured out how to send text over HTTPS to have low-quality content befitting of their low-quality stacks. I'm all the better for using my adblocker to block them from my search results page forever; it saves me time in the long run.

Security isn't everything, there's also accessibility to think about.

HTTPS breaks in many circumstances when it's not needed, including on current browsers.

You can also use a stripping proxy.

Bigger issues I've encountered with actually using Mosaic is that a) it does not support the Host header, so you must have a dedicated IP address, and b) it doesn't like semicolons in then Content-Type header, which most of today's servers include.

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/07/crypto-ancienne-20-now-b...

[1] I have heard of people trying to get Mosaic to work on modern machines, but I think the efforts were restricted to rebuilding the software rather than adding features.

Should be no need for any website to require JavaScript to function.

As for music streaming and instant messaging, not everyone has/needs Discord, Slack, Teams, or anything like that. If you absolutely need it for work, just whitelist it. No problemo. And, not everyone streams music. I barely used Spotify myself until I got an office job and needed something to fill the boredom.

The issue isn't about stopping Javascript as a whole. The issue is about permissions management. Not every site needs it, so not every site should have it. If you need it to work for a webapp, just enable it.

Conditional loading certainly can improve perf. in theory. I've yet to see any evidence it does so in practice. The aggregate of bundle-size, bundle-parse, client-side execution resource-usage & added latency of the plethora of metadata normally bundled with API responses is more than enough to negate any actual perf. gains.

As for "easier to maintain", I've never seen anyone even try to make that argument in theory, nevermind practice. Pretty sure it's widely accepted even by advocates of this architecture that it's a trade-off of perf. gains for ease-of-maintenance losses.

It is one of those things where in theory if absolutely everything was done right and no other stuff was done differently it can work. E.g. if the only difference between a JS-enabled and a JS-disabled version of the site was the content change and nothing else (no additional JS frameworks, functionality or whatever) then yes it most likely can be faster (though for the difference to be noticeable the site needs to be rather heavy in the first place).

Problem being that in practice this comes with a bunch of other baggage that not only throws the benefit out of the window but introduces a bunch of other issues as well.

The reality is, with node junk, the average site uses 10mb of js, taking 5s to render, to show 1kb of text.

Get rid of that 10mb of js, all those fonts, and you don't need to update only part of a page.

It will load and render in 10ms.

Today's Google Maps is a shadow of its original self, which did have a no-JS version, by the way. It has gradually gotten simultaneously heavier, less convenient, more annoying, and less useful, and I've just about had it.

Just off the top of my head, it no longer displays zip codes, takes a long time to load, has missing street names on the map, often promotes features I do not want while taking away features I do want, and is covered so thick with paid-promotion items that I can barely find somewhere to click that isn't an ad.

I've built several SaaS products and I can't imagine building a complicated product that supports both a JS and no JS version with a small, startup team.

The solution is to develop sites with accessibility in mind. Use a screen reader; experience what ALL your users will experience. Experiment with various rendering tools to emulate color blindness.

There are even more tools to performance tune your website.

This all comes down to the site author taking the time to cater to as many users as possible. It is not inherently a problem with the use of JavaScript, or dynamic elements.

So, yeah, there are a lot of shitty websites out there. Folks that choose to deliberately cripple their browser are more likely to see these shortcomings.

I do think that the screen typography department has been seriously lacking here, though. Scrolling a single column can't really be the end of wisdom.

But the main problem we've got is that the ad people took care of on-screen typography once we progress far enough that screen sizes and resolutions actually would've made more things possible. Not the tradition of typography that made newspapers, books etc., but the flyer and full-page-ad demographic. PageMaker, not FrameMaker.

Browsers barely have the tools to make reading effective and enjoyable. CSS is oriented towards other purposes, and the browsers themselves only have the bare necessities – practically hidden "user stylesheets" or the one-size-fits-all "reader mode".

    (function dammit() {
      setTimeout(dammit, 100);
      let els = document.querySelectorAll('object,embed,iframe,video');
      for (let el of els) {
        el.parentNode.removeChild(el);
      }
    })();

https://gist.github.com/caseywatts/c0cec1f89ccdb8b469b1

So the author, having lived through the computing sea change of the 80s and 90s, who said "those who have content generally value being readable" should have anticipated higher resolution displays and took steps to ensure readability.