Not a good day for browsers
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Latest Firefox update has made scrolling all jagged, as well as occasionally having me have to fight window losing focus when activating web search box.
Goodbye Firefox (maybe?).
So yesterday I shifted my main browsing to Chromium. Time to install some sweet extensions to customize my experience!
ARGHARGRGHAGGHAG!!!.....
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Perhaps, you must download more RAM?
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So yesterday I shifted my main browsing to Chromium.
Well, that turned out to be an outright lie.
We'll see for how long though.
Maybe I should try UZBL
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Maybe I should try UZBL
Or links2. It's much better than elinks because it has a "2" at the end and elinks doesn't have any number, so it must be much much shittier.
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links2 is also a graphical browser, but without javascript support1. elinks has javascript support, but is text. Therefore, elinks is best if you want to Discourse
1 It used to have JS support, but that was buggy, so the developers removed it.
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To be honest, I think that now they Atwood's reinvented forum software and has yet another time changed the world, he should go and reinvent web browsing.
INFINISCROLL INSTEAD OF TABS!!!
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Necro because OMG WHY DID NO-ONE TELL ME ABOUT THIS?
Any program can only be really useful if it complies with the Unix philosophy. Web browsers (and other tools that work with HTML, such as feed readers) are frequent violators of this principle:
- They build in way too much things into one (complex) program, dramatically decreasing the options to do things the way you want.
- They store things in way too fancy formats (XML, RDF, SQLite, etc.) which are hard to store under version control, reuse in other scripts, and so on.
The Uzbl project was started as an attempt to resolve this.
FAQ:
Where are the widgets (forward button, back button, search bar, etc)?
There are none. What we do have is a powerful statusbar and lots of keybinding possibilities.Why can't I type anything in forms?
By default uzbl is modal (like vi). It starts in command mode, not in insert mode. If you don't like this you can easily change it.Uzbl uses too much memory, especially when multiple windows are open
It's not as bad as its looks! Linux (and other systems) report memory usage in a confusing way.Yeah, baby! Let's go!
Now, how do we actually go to a URL? Guess I'd better read the cheat sheet.
Meh, I guess I'll just browse around the "Seems like it works!" page, the rest of the internet sucks anyway.
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@clatter this uzbl people are really dedicated to their trolling, or totally crazy
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@fbmac uzbl is kind of nice because it has mouseless browsing, the following links and buttons without having to use your mouse in an intuitive (once you know the shortcut) way is handy. it's also pretty easy to customize that functionality.
but unix philosophy, so it must be good.
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@bb36e said in Not a good day for browsers:
unix philosophy
What one thing does Unix do well? Seems to me like the concept is broken from the start, since an OS works fundamentally differently to something like
cat
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@Jaloopa The one thing is "shove your shitty broken software at unsuspecting users", and they do it pretty well.
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Now, now, the Unix philosophy is great for any professional software researcher using an ASR-33 as their primary interface to a PDP-7
Well, at least if their entire goal is to port a vector-graphics video game to an already obsolete platform, it is... IOW, Unix started out as the equivalent of some kids trying to write a Flappy Bird clone so they could show off their leet skillz on Steam. Kind of explains a lot, don't you think?
EDIT: I originally wrote 'text-menu-only game', because I was confusing Space Travel with the old startrek text game (the predecessor of the BASIC one which appears in the Ahl book) . My Bad.
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@blakeyrat one day you have to tell us what got you so angry with OSS
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@fbmac Discourse.
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@clatter said in Not a good day for browsers:
They store things in way too fancy formats (XML, RDF, SQLite, etc.) which are hard to store under version control, reuse in other scripts, and so on.
Oh yes, XML, notoriously difficult to store under version control, and so hard to parse programmatically. Much better to create an ad-hoc text format for every single file. Unix philosophy!
And those other browsers with widgets everywhere, ew. What's the point of a program if you don't have to study the manual for several hours to figure out how to use it?
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Wow, I've never seen a thread get necroed by the first reply.
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@XanderTheGamer Nah, it must be something long before Discourse. He is never going to tell us, isn't him? But it smells like there is a good story behind this.
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@otter Likely the .com software that threw around Open Source as a buzzword.
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@fbmac said in Not a good day for browsers:
@blakeyrat one day you have to tell us what got you so angry with OSS
I think he tried to install some app and it put some file in a subtly wrong place.
Oh no wait, that was Java.
I guess he installed a new version, and it was a bit slow.
No wait, that was Mac.
Hmm....
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@XanderTheGamer said in Not a good day for browsers:
@fbmac Discourse.
Discourse happened way after the hatred.
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@bb36e The UI is.
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@Zecc said in Not a good day for browsers:
Latest Firefox update has made scrolling all jagged, as well as occasionally having me have to fight window losing focus when activating web search box.
That was posted Dec 2014, so I assume that was FF34.
Which, I'll just note, is > FF22.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Not a good day for browsers:
@Zecc said in Not a good day for browsers:
Latest Firefox update has made scrolling all jagged, as well as occasionally having me have to fight window losing focus when activating web search box.
That was posted Dec 2014, so I assume that was FF34.
Which, I'll just note, is > FF22.
You're SO good with numbers!
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@kt_ Better at it than Square Enix NA is, at any rate. Or did you mean Firefox?
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@ScholRLEA I hear Mozilla's due to release FF 45-II.
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Firefox 47.0 removes the 3D view from the developer console. :(
Can't remember the last time I used it, to be honest.
ETA: it also removes FUEL. I hope nothing breaks.
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@Zecc said in Not a good day for browsers:
Firefox 47.0 removes the 3D view from the developer console
It was pretty useful for designing and debugging layouts when using raw html and css
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@bb36e said in Not a good day for browsers:
@ScholRLEA I hear Mozilla's due to release FF 45-II.
What, no Firefox: All The Nerdiest?
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@Zecc said in Not a good day for browsers:
Firefox 47.0 removes the 3D view
NO
I refuse to believe this!
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@blek said in Not a good day for browsers:
Wow, I've never seen a thread get necroed by the first reply.
Goddamn, you're correct. OP was 2 years ago, first reply was 18 months later.
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@Polygeekery said in Not a good day for browsers:
@blek said in Not a good day for browsers:
Wow, I've never seen a thread get necroed by the first reply.
Goddamn, you're correct. OP was 2 years ago, first reply was 18 months later.
You're welcome? Do I get a 
yet? 
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@Tsaukpaetra Here:
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@boomzilla this is like that time in December 2012 when I got a ❥ from a Valve employee on my Steam profile. http://steamcommunity.com/id/nightgunner5/allcomments#comment_828924672564651359
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@anonymous234 said in Not a good day for browsers:
Oh yes, XML, notoriously difficult to store under version control, and so hard to parse programmatically. Much better to create an ad-hoc text format for every single file. Unix philosophy!
Most XML files are ad-hoc formats. If you're doing one anyway, why artificially constrain yourself in what it looks like?
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@Gąska said in Not a good day for browsers:
If you're doing one anyway, why artificially constrain yourself in what it looks like?
Then you need to figure out how to build a serializer and parser that handles your format. With XML, you can basically work at the level of the parse tree or (in some rather popular languages) having tooling let you work at a level that corresponds to your actual data model.
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Same with JSON, YAML, TOML, et cetera et cetera... And they all usually look much better.
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@dkf OK, make it just JSON. Still better than XML in most cases.
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@ben_lubar It's like that time I sold my amateur Thundarr the Barbarian fan site to a guy working at Raven Software and he paid me (partially) with an as-yet-unreleased gold master of Soldier of Fortune II. (Also some cash, which is good, because Soldier of Fortune II wasn't very good. If he'd contacted me a year earlier, I might have a gold master of Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. Sigh.)
Uzbl - web interface tools which adhere to the unix philosophy.
