NoScript too. Websites don't get to load shit until I decide they're allowed to. And even then, I'm only allowing the bare minimum for the site to function.
uMatrix is also a pretty neat addon that's similar to NoScript. It blocks 3rd party HTTP requests similar to NoScript (as most of those are javascript), but it allows more fine-grained control over what specifically you block and allow. For example, I can allow imgur to send images, but block their cookies/scripts/xhr.
I migrated from Pale Moon to Brave, after being a user for years. Pale Moon simply isn't the project it used to be. There's a huge amount of developer drama, which started impacting getting actual feature requests and bug fixes addressed. On top of that, Pale Moon is simply getting outpaced by the rate the internet is changing. More and more sites are nonfunctional, including just about everything considered "mainstream." It's no longer a browser you can daily drive.
You must have left before Tobi got given the boot. There's no drama anymore. It's also in a much better position feature and bug-wise. You're wrong about the last part. It's not being outpaced by "the rate the internet is changing by". That's all on google. Which you just confirmed by changing to a google browser.. tsk tsk. I use Pale Moon 99% of the time, and it works on most sites. There are ways around the troublesome sites. It isn't the browser that should change, but the sites coding only for google.
I've heard a couple people talk about this, but I never figured out how it works. Is there something you program into your router? Do you have to buy something?
I suppose that it depends on your router, but I ended up just buying a Raspberry Pi. It’s actually pretty straight forward. If you can configure a home internet router then you can set up Pi Hole.
Be forewarned that it does not block YouTube ads (which are the bane of my existence).
Yeah, I mostly watch it on my Fire Stick and Apple TV. Since the Fire Stick is basically an Android device, I’m holding out hope that the Vanced project is resurrected and I can load it onto it.
The modern internet is so slow as to be completely unusable on even my 5 year old smart phone. 20 years of teaching programmers "don't worry so much about optimizing your code: programmer time is expensive, computers are cheap, and anyways modern optimizing compilers are really good" has led us to this point.
I think if I were a Computer Engineer I'd constantly be having existential crises, as I wondered just why I was worried about shaving nanoseconds off instruction pipelines when the software guys are just going to use the CPU to run 50 layers of interpreted code on it; and how maybe I wouldn't have to worry about my job so much if only the damned programmers worried a little bit more about system performance.
and anyways modern optimizing compilers are really good
See also why AI art will never replace human artists.
And why Respeecher getting exclusive rights to James Earl Jones' Vader voice will never replace the actual man.
Side note: Why the fuck didn't they just get Matt Sloan? You know, from those old Chad Vader videos? Lucasfilm even hired him to voice the actual Darth Vader in The Force Unleashed, because his impression is THAT good.
I think if I were a Computer Engineer I'd constantly be having existential crises, as I wondered just why I was worried about shaving nanoseconds off instruction pipelines when the software guys are just going to use the CPU to run 50 layers of interpreted code on it; and how maybe I wouldn't have to worry about my job so much if only the damned programmers worried a little bit more about system performance.
Reminds me of IPv6 arguments at work.
"Why are we allocating 18 quintillion addresses? We only need eight."
"We can't route anything smaller than that publicly."
Popups. Popups Everywhere. I still have some memories of the days when popups were along the lines of "Congratulations, you won!" and with adblock it seems like a long time ago.
I also remember talking to a guy on the chat protocol Matrix (It's a great one, I must add!) and he made his hatred of Javascript pretty clear to me.
Not just that but it is objectively worse. You can type something into (insert search engine of choice), with quotation marks and boolean operators and such and it still will flood the first page of results with useless information.
Add on top of that that some pages of multi-million dollar corporations just straight up don't work or take forever to load.
There is no excuse for how pathetic the internet is nowadays yet here we are.
my ability to use strong search terms is meaningless now. I used to be a search-god and now I know that the best way to get a "result" is to use natural language question rather than an optimized search term. I miss being able to find really good information if you have really good search skills. Now it's always Quora, Wikipedia and several shopping sites.
God yes this, this so much. Search engines are so bad now if you know what you are searching for. SEO has really crapped up the Internet too.
For technical issues, it used to be you could google a problem (an error message, a symptom, a programming language issue) and you would almost always get either a manual or the exact thing you were looking for.
Now you find 1000 "how to XXXX" pages that aren't actually related and are just advertising clickbait. You get 15 minutes youtube videos that maybe--MAYBE--have some good content in there somewhere. etc. MAybe you're really lucky and you find a stackoverflow or reddit page with someone with the same issue, and once you scroll past the first 50 karma whore answers "did u try rebooting?" you find a single poster who has the solution.
It drives me crazy that if I google a function -- e.g., "php strlen" -- php.net is not the top hit 100% of the time. There's w3schools, geeksforgeeks, tutorials.com, etc.
I hate it so much when I click something and the page just fucking moves and I hit something else. Just fucking make it so the page doesn't show until it's fully loaded.
Or load a simple HTML file in .000009 of a nanosecond it actually takes for my computer to interpret that code. Stop waiting on responses from millions of bots and ads and 3rd party sites and just do the one thing I asked you to do.
I would have closed the web page at the location prompt.
To be fair, most websites won’t do more than two or three of these things. Some of these are just trashy and/or suspicious and should be closed out ASAP. The good websites won’t do more than ask about cookies, if even that.
It’s not like websites in 2005 didn’t have their problems either. Pop ups were crazy back then and the websites themselves were all over the place.
in 2005 you could actually find price differentiation for an item between different sites. Now there are 10 million sites offering said item for sale but they are all "online only storefronts" whos supply of said item is the same warehouse and therefore the price of the item on those 10 million different sites is exactly the same.
Internet: doing this shit
Also Internet: pweeease disabwu adblock uwu
uBlock, Adblock Plus, and adblocker ultimate. Because there's no kill like overkill when it comes to ads. I see none.
NoScript too. Websites don't get to load shit until I decide they're allowed to. And even then, I'm only allowing the bare minimum for the site to function.
uMatrix is also a pretty neat addon that's similar to NoScript. It blocks 3rd party HTTP requests similar to NoScript (as most of those are javascript), but it allows more fine-grained control over what specifically you block and allow. For example, I can allow imgur to send images, but block their cookies/scripts/xhr.
I do that on my
tracking devicephone and my router, but I guess I could do it on my PC too.Get ready for Chrome extension manifest v3, which kills useful adblocker functionality.
Or use Brave, which has ad blocking built in.
Brave's adblocker is nowhere near as powerful as uBlock Origin.
Migrate to Pale Moon, they don't use google's Web Extensions, unlike firefox and chrom/ium browsers.
I migrated from Pale Moon to Brave, after being a user for years. Pale Moon simply isn't the project it used to be. There's a huge amount of developer drama, which started impacting getting actual feature requests and bug fixes addressed. On top of that, Pale Moon is simply getting outpaced by the rate the internet is changing. More and more sites are nonfunctional, including just about everything considered "mainstream." It's no longer a browser you can daily drive.
You must have left before Tobi got given the boot. There's no drama anymore. It's also in a much better position feature and bug-wise. You're wrong about the last part. It's not being outpaced by "the rate the internet is changing by". That's all on google. Which you just confirmed by changing to a google browser.. tsk tsk. I use Pale Moon 99% of the time, and it works on most sites. There are ways around the troublesome sites. It isn't the browser that should change, but the sites coding only for google.
I was watching something on PlutoTV for kicks, and was astounded at how much crap uBlock Origin was picking up.
uBlock Origin alone is enough, adding others will only create conflicts.
I've heard a couple people talk about this, but I never figured out how it works. Is there something you program into your router? Do you have to buy something?
I suppose that it depends on your router, but I ended up just buying a Raspberry Pi. It’s actually pretty straight forward. If you can configure a home internet router then you can set up Pi Hole.
Be forewarned that it does not block YouTube ads (which are the bane of my existence).
Newpipe is a good open-source, adblocking Youtube app for Android. It's available on the FDroid appstore.
NewPipe
On android, the Brave browser will play youtube videos and block ads. Though you can't get background playback
Yeah, I mostly watch it on my Fire Stick and Apple TV. Since the Fire Stick is basically an Android device, I’m holding out hope that the Vanced project is resurrected and I can load it onto it.
Vanced doesn't really work on the Amazon Firestick since it's optimized for a touch interface.
I've been running a virtual instance of pi-hole for many years. Offloading from the browser to the network is the only way to go.
The modern internet is so slow as to be completely unusable on even my 5 year old smart phone. 20 years of teaching programmers "don't worry so much about optimizing your code: programmer time is expensive, computers are cheap, and anyways modern optimizing compilers are really good" has led us to this point.
I think if I were a Computer Engineer I'd constantly be having existential crises, as I wondered just why I was worried about shaving nanoseconds off instruction pipelines when the software guys are just going to use the CPU to run 50 layers of interpreted code on it; and how maybe I wouldn't have to worry about my job so much if only the damned programmers worried a little bit more about system performance.
Most of the slowdown is from ads though. Nothing you can "optimize" out of that besides changing your flow around user satisfaction.
See also why AI art will never replace human artists.
And why Respeecher getting exclusive rights to James Earl Jones' Vader voice will never replace the actual man.
Side note: Why the fuck didn't they just get Matt Sloan? You know, from those old Chad Vader videos? Lucasfilm even hired him to voice the actual Darth Vader in The Force Unleashed, because his impression is THAT good.
You can thank google trying to take over the web for that. Look up WHATWG.
Reminds me of IPv6 arguments at work.
"Why are we allocating 18 quintillion addresses? We only need eight."
"We can't route anything smaller than that publicly."
Should have just done IPv4.1 and added another octet on the front, assumed 0. when absent, and called it a day.
The telephone companies already dealt with this problem, and it was pretty easy for them.
I'm impressed you have IPv6 arguments at all.
I work for a crazy person. We're doing it, whether anyone likes it or not. The only question is how much we can slow it down.
Funnily enough, most network problems on BYOD networks can be fixed by dropping all v6 traffic at the edge.
Every time they make CPUs faster, engineers get dumber
Javascript is a pox on all web design.
Popups. Popups Everywhere. I still have some memories of the days when popups were along the lines of "Congratulations, you won!" and with adblock it seems like a long time ago.
I also remember talking to a guy on the chat protocol Matrix (It's a great one, I must add!) and he made his hatred of Javascript pretty clear to me.
Just like the internet became unusable without an ad blocker in the 2000's, it is now unusable without a cookie blocker.
Or just block all that annoying stuff with uBlock Origin, µMatrix, ButWhyModal, RemoveOverlay, and always set block location and notifications.
Also, don't use any google chrome/ium or firefox browsers, because they're the ones implementing this stuff. They're also evil and woke.
The internet of today is junk.
More users than ever before but the smallest it's ever been and shrinking by the day
Not just that but it is objectively worse. You can type something into (insert search engine of choice), with quotation marks and boolean operators and such and it still will flood the first page of results with useless information.
Add on top of that that some pages of multi-million dollar corporations just straight up don't work or take forever to load.
There is no excuse for how pathetic the internet is nowadays yet here we are.
my ability to use strong search terms is meaningless now. I used to be a search-god and now I know that the best way to get a "result" is to use natural language question rather than an optimized search term. I miss being able to find really good information if you have really good search skills. Now it's always Quora, Wikipedia and several shopping sites.
God yes this, this so much. Search engines are so bad now if you know what you are searching for. SEO has really crapped up the Internet too.
For technical issues, it used to be you could google a problem (an error message, a symptom, a programming language issue) and you would almost always get either a manual or the exact thing you were looking for.
Now you find 1000 "how to XXXX" pages that aren't actually related and are just advertising clickbait. You get 15 minutes youtube videos that maybe--MAYBE--have some good content in there somewhere. etc. MAybe you're really lucky and you find a stackoverflow or reddit page with someone with the same issue, and once you scroll past the first 50 karma whore answers "did u try rebooting?" you find a single poster who has the solution.
It drives me crazy that if I google a function -- e.g., "php strlen" -- php.net is not the top hit 100% of the time. There's w3schools, geeksforgeeks, tutorials.com, etc.
I hate it so much when I click something and the page just fucking moves and I hit something else. Just fucking make it so the page doesn't show until it's fully loaded.
Or load a simple HTML file in .000009 of a nanosecond it actually takes for my computer to interpret that code. Stop waiting on responses from millions of bots and ads and 3rd party sites and just do the one thing I asked you to do.
I would have closed the web page at the location prompt.
To be fair, most websites won’t do more than two or three of these things. Some of these are just trashy and/or suspicious and should be closed out ASAP. The good websites won’t do more than ask about cookies, if even that.
It’s not like websites in 2005 didn’t have their problems either. Pop ups were crazy back then and the websites themselves were all over the place.
in 2005 you could actually find price differentiation for an item between different sites. Now there are 10 million sites offering said item for sale but they are all "online only storefronts" whos supply of said item is the same warehouse and therefore the price of the item on those 10 million different sites is exactly the same.
Shits my biggest pet peeve with computing devices today, whether PC or smartphone. It doesn't just happen on the web either.
Can we all just throw it all away and go back to Gopher?