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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

I still use this strategy, though these days, I primarily use Mosaic and Netscape for testing.

I tend to browse without JavaScript enabled, except for places I already trust to not abuse it. And if there is anything blocking me from accessing the page, such as a modal dialog, a cookie notice, a survey, a prompt to sign up for the newsletter, I close the tab.

Over time, I have found that type of rude lack of consideration for the reader's cognitive load and ability to correlate highly with low-quality content that is a waste of my time to read, so this practice also saves me a lot of reading time.

And every day, my Internet gets better and better.

I like the term "featurism", I'm going to try to remember it.

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I feel like the strategy of closing sites with newsletter sign-ups, dialog, etc. is just going to waste your time. If I'm searching for something, I just want the information. Not gonna close websites till I find one that has no popups/modals!!

Popup Blocker [0] and uBlock Origin for Firefox will do a pretty good job of getting rid of the junk you don't want.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/popup-blocker...

> I just want the information

Certainly a reasonable choice on your part. We all want what we want.

I have a friend who, when he goes grocery shopping, grabs the first item he sees from each of the items on his list. As far as I can determine, this is without regard to price, quality, or any other factor.

Statistically speaking, your friend should be getting average products from each category in the long run. Practically speaking, however, the assumptions that go into that statement likely won't hold, as supermarkets go to some lengths to make sure that the first item that meets your eye from any category is one of the pricier options.

> one of the pricier options.

More profitable for the store. The actual expensive stuff is on the top shelf. Eye level will probably be the store and the national brand which skew average or a little below.

It’s one of the instances where your interests and that of the grocery store are mostly aligned. Grocery store wants you to buy more and rotate inventory not necessarily pay a lot for it.

It may seem that way, but I have found it to be very effective.

In my comment, I was thinking of the context of links I click to from HN.

But it also works when searching for information. When I close the tab of an unfriendly site, which, remember, likely has lower-quality information than an accessible one, I am immediately freeing myself to click the next link in the search results and get my information from an accessible site with higher-quality content.

Given the disparity of the quality of content, it is quite likely that I would have ended up at the latter site anyway.

I concur on using an adblocker to block modals, cookie notices, dickbars, related articles, author profile pictures, etc. In fact, I never dismiss modals because doing so may imply consent to tracking cookies (you never know these days…). I just block them with a quick cosmetic selector-based filter.

Unless it's a personal site/blog I typically open a site to find information I came for, and close it as soon as that task is done. Anything that makes this take longer than it needs to gets blocked. Sites should strive to stay open for as few seconds/minutes as possible while still giving me the requested information.

Regarding text/image-focused sites that require JS: I generally find sites made by people who haven't figured out how to send text over HTTPS to have low-quality content befitting of their low-quality stacks. I'm all the better for using my adblocker to block them from my search results page forever; it saves me time in the long run.

There are pros and cons to the approach. Information from such actively hostile sites tends to be of a lesser quality and of questionable reliability anyway IMHO.

Before closing the tab, I check if View -> Page Style -> No Style gives the text I was interested in reading. If i arrived on the page, chances are that there might be some information I'm looking for.

thanks, this is fascinating and useful

I like the term "featurism", I'm going to try to remember it.

You're going to love the qualified version:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=creeping%20f...

Are there any version of Mosaic that are able to handle modern HTTPS?

Still plenty of websites which run on HTTP. I know mine certainly do.

Security isn't everything, there's also accessibility to think about.

HTTPS breaks in many circumstances when it's not needed, including on current browsers.

You can also use a stripping proxy.

Bigger issues I've encountered with actually using Mosaic is that a) it does not support the Host header, so you must have a dedicated IP address, and b) it doesn't like semicolons in then Content-Type header, which most of today's servers include.

> Security isn't everything, there's also accessibility to think about.

TLS is not just about security. It also protects the authenticity of your content, ensures privacy and even accessibility for your visitors. Without it, any node between your visitor and your server could inject content and JavaScript to do all sorts of nefarious tracking and profiling.

These days there's really no excuse for using plain HTTP on public facing sites. Please rethink your decision.

It's not just your site: an HTTP site allows for injecting HTTP urls for images/css files on other sites, e.g.

  <link src="http://target.site/...">

If target.site's auth or session cookies aren't properly protected, this is sufficient for stealing them [1]. And plenty of sites have insufficient protection on their cookies [1].

[1] http://www.open.ou.nl/hjo/papers/compsec21.pdf

Thanks for the paper link.

There are risks and there are benefits. Managing the risks to get the benefits is the game.

My sites only use cookies for user preferences preferences and client-linked session tokens, so I am not too worried.

A different way to mitigate the risks is by only storing information that does not need to be private, remaining small and un-interesting, designing for transparency and auditability, and keeping a close eye on those audit logs.

Actually, there is a very good excuse: I want to access the content I need with the browser and configuration I currently have, and without the ability to alter it.

While the threat of MITM is technically true, thanks to being on a relatively safe networks segment, I have yet to encounter it happening in the real world, except in cases of captive portals, when I actually want it to happen.

I think it is largely an over-stated threat for most read-only applications.

The impact on accessibility, on the other hand, is real and huge.

You must be lucky. My cellphone carrier used to injects scripts and ads on plain http requests. Imagine seeing ads on wikipedia. Now that https is everywhere, this behavior is largely stop.

I know that ads sometimes get injected for some people, but it has not been an issue for me.

I see loud and intrusive ads on Wikipedia already, and it's why I've started using wikiless instead.

Are you sure about seeing ads Wikipedia? AFAIK Wikipedia itself doesn't run any ads [1] (except occasional call for donation), so the ads must've come from other source (e.g malicious extensions, malwares that install mitm proxy to inject ads, etc).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Funding_Wikipedia_th...

There was similar discussion about "provide un-encrypted access to your pages for accessibility" few months ago here at HN under "Consider disabling HTTPS auto redirects" post [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31895148

Bolt it on! Here's XMosaic 2.7b5 with TLS 1.3 on my own SPARC. (Disclosure: my project.)

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/07/crypto-ancienne-20-now-b...

I don't know about Mosaic[1], but there are many alternatives out there. I frequently use elinks as a text only browser since it makes an attempt to layout pages (most pages have some form of layout to handle navigation elemnts these days). There are also browsers that handle graphics, but not scripting or CSS, if that is what you want.

[1] I have heard of people trying to get Mosaic to work on modern machines, but I think the efforts were restricted to rebuilding the software rather than adding features.

Honestly thinking on making a Mosaic clone. Without CSS or Javascript, I imagine it won't be terribly difficult to put together

I’ve been quite impressed by the Gemini browser LaGrange[1]. Does it’s own antialiased text rendering straight to SDL. Automatic site coloring as an option. Would be neat to see something like this with basic HTML 3-ish support (basic tables, lists etc)

[1]: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

I think it's a great idea! Go for it!

Web 2.5 is a thing.

Why not start by disabling JS and CSS in an existing browser?

Im just saying I think making a new Mosaic would be a fun project. Been watching Andreas Kling do his browser hacking lately and it looks like a lot of fun

you mean andreas kling

Right. I love his livestreams but I struggle with his name a lot. Apologies

Probably if using a local HTTP proxy to relay the actual traffic?

> I like the term "featurism", I'm going to try to remember it.

They actually could have translated it 1:1 as “featuritis”. It basically means the same as “feature creep”.

I think they're two different, related words. Featuritis, the condition of software having too many features, is caused by featurism, the underconstrained and overemphasized pursuit of features.

Not to mention people in the country suffer for featurism. In 2009 I had dial-up because broadband was unavailable where I was, and it took as long as 12 minutes to load some pages. I have since moved and no longer rely on dial-up, but I can only imagine how long it would take now with all the bloat happening. Honestly not sure how they do it these days.

When I get obtrusive, unrequested maillist popups, I signup someone from my frequent spammer list. Makes me feel good :)

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