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Comment by jmcphers | Hacker News Reader

The cookie popup that comes up and obscures the article before you can finish reading the title is deliciously ironic.

If you are lucky. There's the cookie popup, the newsletter popup, the popup that wants to talk about new features....and on and on. All while macOS gives you three popups for the same calendar event, a software update that it thinks you should know about right fucking now and a slew of popups from some application you started which now wants to disrupt your flow with.....more alerts.

PS: if someone knows who wrote the calendar daemon in macOS, please say hello from me and ensure they know how pathetic I think it is that they managed to spend 70-80% CPU to update calendars. Really? Do them a favor and get them application forms in the "rapid food preparation" industry.

The Calendar app on my iPhone used 50mb of data in the last month. I have maybe 10 events in it. I can’t even begin to understand how it managed to pull 50mb. WhatsApp, which I use nonstop daily, pulled 3mb.

Sure, on an unlimited cap 50mb is no problem. But when roaming it could cost a fortune. Seems like minimising resource usage is often an afterthought, even for Apple.

Hmm, it almost makes me suspicious that the calendar system is abused to move data it isn't supposed to move.

IIRC the Calendar standards (iCal, etc) are pull-based, so your Calendar app has to poll/request the whole calendar constantly to check for new events in case you make one on another device (e.g. your computer). There are also enough edge cases that also nobody wants to change/improve on the standards.

WhatsApp can send you a push when you get a message, so its usage is ~nothing if you're not sending and receiving messages.

That still doesn't explain why it has to consume huge amounts of CPU.

With uBlock Origin set for default deny all Javascript, there are zero popup's while reading the entire article.

God I wish I could make that run on my iPhone.

Not being able to set per domain javascript rules is fucking infuriating

Not sure about iPhone, but most browsers on Android (e.g. Chrome, Edge) let you disable JavaScript in "site settings" by default. You then opt-in for a given site by clicking the little padlock on the address bar and enabling JavaScript for the site in question. Also works for things like audio, location, etc.

Safari on iOS lets you do this in the system settings

lynx(1) on termux does this automatically. :)

Yes, I use lynx as my main browser except for HN. Everything else is lynx.

Further OT: My ex-father-in-law will tell me in SMS or email something to the effect of "Use a graphical browser...[to see this URL]."

Genuinely not sure what methods they went through, but you can install it (and other firefox+chrome extensions) on the Orion browser. But they also have a built-in ad & tracking blocker that works well

Firefox allows you to install addons.

A lesson for us all

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