Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nux | Hacker News Reader

Privacy loving European here.

I want to like it, but it gives off a bad vibe.

First of all it's too loaded and it doesn't seem to work at all without Javascript enabled. Give me a text field, I don't care about the news.

Second, no easy way to add it in my Firefox search engine list. This is really something obvious they should fix, come on.

Third, they want you to install an extension that will indeed set qwant as default search engine, but also seems to try to shove down your throat some sort of bookmark and "board" (their own thing, pinterest like?) management which requires login to their service.

http://img.nux.ro/q9M-Menu_292.png

IMHO it doesn't really live up to the expectations and it seems more like a social media experiment attempt.

If we forego the whole privacy thing which I think they are only using for marketing here, then the search results don't seem too bad (in my 2 minutes of testing) and the boards thing is interesting, but nah.

View on HN

The https://lite.qwant.com/ seems to work without Javascript.

>First of all it's too loaded and it doesn't seem to work at all without Javascript enabled. with noscript turned on, quant.com redirects me to lite.quant.com

>Second, no easy way to add it in my Firefox search engine list. This is really something obvious they should fix, come on. I see a green plus in the corner of the magnifying glass icon in the search box and when you click it, at the bottom of the search engines I have installed I see "Add quant."

Thanks, "lite" should be the default really. Much better.

I don't see that green plus you are talking about, I stared and stared.

Here's a screencap on my end: https://imgur.com/9ZgNh4Y

Thanks, I was blind, but now I see.

Agree. That's the reason why Google has won the minds and hearts during the search engine wars: no bloat.

Right now I'm reading the frontpage and getting distracted from news with political opinions to which I don't even agree. Basically getting in the way of engineering.

I see others already mentioned the lite version. For a quickly loading page with minimal extras that just let's you search you can try https://ixquick.com.

It integrates nicely into Firefox. I've found results to be pretty good and relevant when I use it. Found it before DDG and now I use both depending on what machine I'm on.

Anyway, they claim they are "the world's most private search engine".

Adding to that: they advertise the app for android. The app wants access to contacts, identity, all available networks (wifi scans) and a bunch of other stuff, where I ask myself why it is needed. I also want(ed) to like it, but you are exactly right about that bad vibe. We finally need a search engine that just costs a monthly fee or gets paid via coinhive or the like....

> Second, no easy way to add it in my Firefox search engine list. This is really something obvious they should fix, come on.

That's weird, on my side I have the "Add Qwant" option show up in my firefox search field. I'm on Firefox 56.0.2 Win7.

> First of all it's too loaded and it doesn't seem to work at all without Javascript enabled. Give me a text field, I don't care about the news.

I genuinely don't understand this hostile statement. Why do you complain that a website isn't functional in pure html in 2017? do you want the web to look like it's 1998?

Why is it a problem to have page functional without Javascript? It's the number one tools for spying on users, so especially if you're a privacy focused search engine, you should except people to have Javascript disabled, until they choose to trust you.

There's no real need to javascript on search engines or news sites. There might be some additional features, like polls that will require Javascript, but the base functionality should work.

I'm still a firm believer in progressive enhancement, even if it's no longer trendy. Modern Javascript framework however seems to be firmly in the "Javascript or die" camp.

Because a search engine must run on the widest array of web browsers possible. For being a European search engine and based in France to boot, they should very well be aware of platforms which have minimal or no JavaScript support in their web browsers, like for example the classic AmigaOS. If someone with a platform like that tries to use their search engine to perhaps find a JavaScript enabled client, they couldn’t. Lots of TV sets nowadays have built-in web browsers with no or incomplete JavaScript support, as another example.

However the worst offense is that JavaScript is utterly unnecessary in a web search application, so that would be introducing an artificial dependency, one of the worst crimes in software development. Software should be designed with minimal dependencies it needs to do the job and the extras should be the users’ choice. Developers who made this choice for users historically lost their user base as soon as a competing application which had less dependencies showed up; there is a lesson to be learned from that.

> For being a European search engine and based in France to boot, they should very well be aware of platforms which have minimal or no JavaScript support in their web browsers,

I don't understand this statement. Is there less js-enabled browser in Europe, or in France?

Commodore Amiga and ATARI ST were big in France (and still are, if the demoscene contributions are anything to go by); In Europe, Amiga is still a thing. ATARI ST is still a thing. Neither of those have complete JavaScript support, if any. That’s where “the French connection” comes from in this context.

You are conflating two different things. It is indeed completely possible to have nice looking websites without javascript. Heavy use of javascript is often a huge waste of resources anyway.

The question is only; how much is too much. And considering your competition is Google, that answer is: not a lot.

Not parent, but Javascript enables a lot of nasty business and often slows pages down on my not-so-fast work PC, so I disable it. If a website has a good reason to need it (e.g. apps like Google Docs), it gets whitelisted. Typically, one doesn't need a script for displaying text and filling forms.

Let's reverse the question: the task "map this text input to a list of links" could be done in 1998 with no scripts, why is it dependent on JS in 2017?

> I genuinely don't understand this hostile statement. Why do you complain that a website isn't functional in pure html in 2017?

Because sites that rely on javascript typically have terrible performance and broken UI, and add insult to injury by not doing anything that actually needed javascript in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com