I'll out myself as a luddite: I hate the modern web. I hate nearly everything about it other than the fat high-speed link I use to connect to it. I hate the animation, the video, the ever more insidious and unblock-able pop-ups. I hate that technical posts that used to be just some text I could quickly skim are now often videos I have to watch (I'm looking at you MSDN Channel 9!). I absolutely hate video. It's a terrible medium for communicating information to a person who is trying to multitask. It should be strictly reserved for porn and other entertainment. I hate Flash. I hate how Flash ads sit there and suck up my battery life. I hate Javascript that does the same. If I've just got my browser open to a page and I'm working in Emacs, Safari should be sitting at 0.0 (maybe 0.1)% CPU usage, not waking up my CPU constantly to do whatever shit it thinks it needs to do.
Text is great. Civilization pretty much peaked when we figured out how to blast text from the other side of the planet to your screen in 150-200 milliseconds. It's been downhill from there.
You just want to read text? How pedestrian. Don't you want to visit a blog post, stare at a blank screen for a couple seconds while a couple dozen HTTP requests are shot off for the JS, and then grabbed using an XHR? Or even better, a WebSocket? It's a modern convenience few people would want to give up!
What's especially awesome is when they take a minute to load, after you've switched to a different tab and have no idea which site is playing them. You get to hunt through all your tabs just to discover who's playing such an awesome ad!
I've used a variety of web browsers, but I've settled on Links as the best one. I can easily watch YouTube videos and in VLC, so no problem there with regards to video. The only thing I fire up Firefox for is my work-related activity which requires Flash and HTML5 to run.
But most of the time, it's
links2 -g
and off I go. A lot of websites look really bad on it though, with formatting errors and crap HTML. Visiting the mobile versions of those sites really clears everything up, though.
Thanks for the reminder about links2 with the -g switch!
Stallman[1] goes one stage further "I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me". I like the 'one firehose' approach (mail, presumably in emacs, for everything). Could add RSS feed watching in I suppose.
I use links2 -g a lot, but as you pointed out, many of sites are pretty bad on it, having pages and pages of crap before the content starts. That said, there are very few ads and paywalls and multimedia distractions.
I do wish it supported animated gifs. Most of the time when I see a gif these days, I don't mind it flashing.
This. It's so refreshing to look at a man page. They're not perfect and rarely contain examples, but we have SO and newsgroups for that. The worst, imo, are online slideshows.
You can very easily achieve all these things, but you're missing the point. The web isn't text on steroids, it's the infancy of the replacement for tv.
"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."
> The web started as a digital version of books and newspapers. Now it's trending towards a replacement for TV? How awful.
The web started as hypermedia with support for very limited media forms. As it supports more media, it fills more roles; becoming hypermedia that includes in the kind of media it supports types which allow it to serve as a replacement for radio, TV, etc., doesn't stop it from having the book/newspaper like functionality.
The modern web is a much better platform for the book/newspaper-like functionality that the early web was used for than the early web was, as well as competing with radio and TV for that kind of functionality.
Awful? Why, because people who like things you don't can also get things they like from the web?
>The modern web is a much better platform for the book/newspaper-like functionality that the early web was used for than the early web was
Really? Do you ever select a few words on a web page, then Ctrl-C it? You did not notice over the last 10 years as browsers have gotten more complex that you now have to use a lot more trial and error to get the words you wanted? How just a tiny movement of the mouse while dragging can have drastic effects on the selection? How text far away or in a different column sometimes gets selected for difficult-to-fathom reasons?
Never noticed how on Safari if the text is next to an image or in a title, it sometimes takes Safari a really long time to transfer the text to the clipboard, sometimes with beachballing involved?
Ever use Ctrl-F to search a web page? Never noticed how "mystery hits" are a lot more frequent than they were 10 years ago? (Where the search stops at some place where there is no visible occurance of the string you searched for.) Never noticed how Ctrl-F is not smart enough to make sure that the hit it is showing you is not obscured by one of those elements that respond to scrolling by remaining at a fixed position relative to the window?
Never noticed how even though links have a relatively short half life, hardly anyone bothers to make a local copy of the pages they have bookmarked because it is such a hard technical problem to write code that makes a local copy of all the "assets" that might be referenced by a page? (Contrast with Usenet, which, for all of its faults, made it easy to make a local copy of an article or a thread of articles.)
Never tried to bookmark a page or send someone a link to a page and notice that you cannot because it is one of those web sites where every "page" has the same URL?
Couldn't agree more, especially if you're a voracious speed reader, watching video is like trying to suck ice cream through a coffee stirrer.
Apparently Microsoft's designers agree, since emphasizing text via typography is one of the goals of Metro [1]. I've been working with it lately and have come to appreciate it.
That's quite ridiculous; iOS style multitasking is severely crippled.
XNU does multitasking fine already; there's no need to screw it up. If you're sick of Safari's memory and CPU usage, just switch to a different browser, but to say something as absurd as wanting task-switching on a desktop OS just for the sake of CPU cycles is short-sighted and a prime reason for the fall of productivity and change for the sake of change.
iOS style multitasking is great for battery life. And for the foreseeable future: 1) I'm not going back, voluntarily, to being tethered to a wall socket; 2) Lithium-ion batteries aren't getting more capacious very quickly.
How is it great for battery life? When applications are inactive, they're already not using CPU cycles. Task-switching involves focusing context, which does eat up CPU time, whereas with standard UNIX multitasking, switching between tasks doesn't switch context.
You could remove the context switch from the equation, but then you'd end up with a setup similar to the current multitasking system, so it's all for nought.
I'm not suggesting that we rip out the existing multitasking ability in OS X. Just the option to freeze SOME apps when I switch away from them, and unfreeze them when I switch back. I can already do this with "killall -STOP Safari" and "killall -CONT Safari". The only thing Apple needs to do is to make it automatic.
I wish I could find something that can read web pages to me while I multi task. I can listen to a video while doing something else, but I can't read and do anything else.
You shouldn't have that attitude. Because since things will progress further in the direction you don't like, it'll be a shame to lose your voice once you quit the web.
Text is great. Civilization pretty much peaked when we figured out how to blast text from the other side of the planet to your screen in 150-200 milliseconds. It's been downhill from there.