undefined | Better HN

0 pointspeterwwillis11y ago0 comments

Okay. If you want to get technical, they ("Phoenix developers") stripped out all the unnecessary Mozilla Suite components, stripped out a ton of browser code, then added their own code. They wanted to be feature-compatible while removing bloat.

Technically it's harder to remain feature compatible if somebody ripped out the "modern BS" from the browser, because anything put into Firefox automatically becomes a de facto web standard. But they're by and large multimedia extensions which shouldn't be considered a necessary part of displaying hypertext.

I think if people want a programmable multimedia platform, that's fine, but they should build it separate from the world wide web so the rest of us can browse the New York Times without a 500MB web browser in resident memory, nor wait for the browser to stop the millions of operations it needs to reload the page due to all the ridiculous and unnecessary crap in the background.

Instead of forking the browser to strip out or redesign the unnecessary crap, i'm suggesting we take pruning shears to Firefox itself, lest we get yet another new tool that tries to replace yet another bloated, antiquated piece of crap.

0 comments

kalleboo11y ago

You don't need a new or changed browser to do any of that. Firefox still renders plain-text HTML that contains nothing more than <h1>, <p> and <a> just fine, blazing fast and I bet it doesn't need much RAM either.

But someone needs to create that content. And you're not getting it from the New York Times unless they can put flashy ads and interactive graphics that entices the majority of the users on the net (who actually enjoy the multimedia platform version of the web).

hollerith11y ago

>Firefox still renders plain-text HTML that contains nothing more than <h1>, <p> and <a> just fine

Not as well as it used to!

Specifically, in the browsers of the 1990s you could "scroll while dragging": i.e., if you start dragging to select some text and you reach the bottom of the window, the window would scroll, allowing you to select more text than just what was on the screen when you started dragging. But at least in Firefox, that does not work anymore. (More precisely, you cannot scroll down although if you start dragging at the end of the selection, you can scroll up.) In other words, browsers have gotten so complicated that even an organization like Mozilla that spends millions of dollars a year on browser development cannot preserve all of the conveniences users used to enjoy for handling text.

My main response, though, is that the browser organizations (Mozilla, Google, MS and Apple) could have balanced the interests of content producers and content consumers instead of their giving content producers (and web-app developers, and marketers) almost everything they want like they have done. It's not as if the New York Times would have withdrawn from the web if the things they could do with code and with stylesheets were more limited.

ben0x53911y ago

This works for me right now on firefox 29.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse