Offtopic but oh boy was that page difficult to scroll. Up/down arrows jump to the next post and page up/down isn't too helpful for reading. I have the keyboard overrides forbidden in my browser but obviously the web page can still bind events to keys not usually reserved for browser shortcuts... So, the usual navigation breaks up, leaving me to learn one particular site's idiosyncratic behaviour in the user interface space. No thanks, I just left.
Some people saw this right from the start. I remember the time when disallowing javascript would mostly spare you from unnecessary and irritating opt-ins, and you could still consume the actual content of the page using the browser as basically a text reader with hyperlinks, like originally intended. Now you can no longer, in effect, do that as pages consider the browser a VM to present themselves, and this just leads to a tug of war between the browser and its users vs the page creators. Both assume a level of control of a more than Turing complete medium and there's no compromise into that. The working solutions I see are either you write programs that run in the browser-VM to implement web stores etc. or you write effectively HTML 1.0 level structured documents to deliver information and leave the presentation to the browser-reader.
Back in the old days HTML was a huge step up from text files and proprietary hypertext documents but these days I'm more like hoping everything was ultimately, mostly plaintext.
The issue existed from me in both firefox and chrome. Click on outside columns will result in normal scroll. Click or highlight in the center column will result in the jumpy scroll that does not quite scroll one comment at a time with up/down arrow.
It kinda happens to me on firefox, one press of the down arrow scrolls so "Here's a formula for the lemniscate in polar coordinates" in the first reply is at the top of the screen, not helpful.
no idea why i even go for bait like this. because i like doing unpaid support work i guess. i tested in firefox and chrome. both work fine and don't do it like op decribes - no keybinds, keys behave normal.
maybe one of the dudes from yesterdays thread that had his own chatgpt programmed browser extensions installed that break the web for him.
This is the license equivalent of a specific automotive spare part for an old car where the dealer asks $1300 for it just to say they don't want to stock and sell those. "Yeah, it's available, sure, but...you don't want it."
Which modern cars, for example? As far as I know the era of positive ground vehicles ended roughly during the fifties, and very much by the sixties at the latest.
Because this is Microsoft we shall apply Gates' razor and must thus conclude that "never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice".
This is a difficult question to answer without knowing whether your Bill Gates context includes his years at Microsoft, or only as a philanthropist with sketchy friends.
If the former, you'll need to present an argument that Microsoft did not hold back the entire industry for 20 years with low quality products, severe user-hostility, and monopolistic practices.
If the latter, you should read up about the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s.
Monopolistic actions are malicious, if you believe in free markets. Gates led the war against Netscape, for one. The setback to the industry and consumers was massive.
Anti-market behavior is today completely normalized, so Gates is very much not alone. Malice is not an unusual phenomenon.
I cringe whenever I think how blazing fast things could be today if only we hadn't bloated the web by 1000x.
In the dial-up era things used to be unworldly fast merely by getting access to something like 10M ethernet. Now mobile connections are way, way faster than physical connections in the 90's but web pages aren't few KB, they are few MB at minimum.
It takes four seconds and 2.5 MB to load my local meteorological institute's weather page which changes not more often than maybe once an hour and could be cached and served as a static base page in a few dozen milliseconds (i.e. instantly). A modern connection that's plenty capable to support all my remote work and development over a VPN and interactive shells without any lag can't help me get modern web pages load any faster because of the amount of data and the required processing/execution of a million lines of javascript that's imported from a bunch of number of sources, with the appropriate handshake delays of new connections implied, for each page load.
A weather page from 2004 served exactly the same information as a weather page from 2024, and that information is everything required to get a sufficient glimpse of today's weather. One web page could be fixed but there are billions of URIs that load poorly. The overall user experience hasn't improved much, if at all. Yes, you can stream 4K video without any problems which reveals how fast things actually are today but you won't see it when browsing common pages -- I'd actually like to say web pages have only gone slower despite the improvements in bandwidth and processing power.
When many pages still had mobile versions it was occasionally a very welcome alternative. Either the mobile version was so crappy you wanted to use the desktop version on your phone, or it was so good you wanted to predominantly load the mobile version even on desktop.
I'd love to see an information internet where things like weather data, news articles, forum posts, etc. would be downloadable as snippets of plaintext, presumably intended to be machine readable, and "web" would actually be a www site that builds a presentation and UI for loading and viewing these snippets. You could use whichever "web" you want but you would still ultimately see the same information. This would disconnect information sources from the presentation which I think is the reason web sites started considering "browser" a programmable platform, thus taking away user control and each site bloating their pages each individually, leaving no choice for the user but maybe some 3rd party monkeyscripts or forced CSS rules.
If the end user could always choose the presentation, the user would be greatly empowered in comparison to the current state of affairs where web users are currently being tamed down to be mere receivers or consumers of information, much not unlike passive TV viewers.
RAII is just automation and semantic sugar for something like this (or the equivalent set of goto labels that do the freeing at the end of the function):
{
void *buffer = malloc(SIZE_MAX);
if (buffer) {
if (!do_stuff(buffer)) {
free(buffer);
return;
}
more_stuff(buffer);
free(buffer);
}
return;
}
If you wanted something like that in C it doesn't need to emulate C++ style RAII with classes and strongly typed constructors. It could look like something like, for example, where you just define pairs of allocator and free functions:
allocdef void *autobuffer(malloc, free);
...
{
autobuffer buffer(SIZE_MAX);
if (buffer) {
if (do_stuff(buffer)) {
return;
}
more_stuff(buffer);
}
return;
}
The implementation would effectively be a Lisp style macro expansion encoded in the C compiler (or preprocessor) that would just basically write out the equivalent of the first listing above.
In the second example, buffer is still a pointer? If so, when does free run, and who decides that? When buffer goes out of scope, could do_stuff store the pointer some place else?
I find this an interesting thought experiment, basically types that you'd opt in to RAII. Just have a feeling that you'll need to define some notion of ownership to make it work.
Last time I tried Gnome I was struggling with the inability to remap shortcuts to clear a way for using my Emacs bindings without the desktop interfering. The ctrl-shift-f for a global search sounds like a generally bad idea that will conflict with a lot applications. Or maybe it doesn't impose itself on applications but only the desktop, I don't know.
But one thing I know that if I disagree with Gnome developers then I'll have a hard time working around and hacking my own way in. I've usually ended up starting to patch Gnome/Gtk components at which points I just realize that it is absolutely futile and I give up.
Gnome used to be the marvel of configurability. Around Gnome2 time there were gazillion settings and options that you could change, and even more via gsettings/gconf. Then the UI was gradually dumbed down but you could still configure most things. "Tweak" tools appeared. Now it seems I bump into an ideological obstacle left and right, and even the tweak tools won't let me change anything much besides some cosmetic properties.
Mate has some rough edges but it's pretty much the only thing that still works for a power user that wants an UI with a traditional window manager of my choice instead of whatever tiling configuration is in hype this year.
The only destined purpose of a nuclear reactor simulator is to gradually let a massive meltdown happen, with gauges slowly increasing in tandem with thrill in anticipation of the upcoming drama and fireworks until you discover a bit too late that... it's too late.
Some people saw this right from the start. I remember the time when disallowing javascript would mostly spare you from unnecessary and irritating opt-ins, and you could still consume the actual content of the page using the browser as basically a text reader with hyperlinks, like originally intended. Now you can no longer, in effect, do that as pages consider the browser a VM to present themselves, and this just leads to a tug of war between the browser and its users vs the page creators. Both assume a level of control of a more than Turing complete medium and there's no compromise into that. The working solutions I see are either you write programs that run in the browser-VM to implement web stores etc. or you write effectively HTML 1.0 level structured documents to deliver information and leave the presentation to the browser-reader.
Back in the old days HTML was a huge step up from text files and proprietary hypertext documents but these days I'm more like hoping everything was ultimately, mostly plaintext.
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