- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- firefox@lemmy.ml
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Anyone know any good terminal based browsers? Browsing hexbear on the CMD line would make me feel really cool.
The fucking nerve to say any of these Ad funded services are free or even services (does someone robbing you count as a service?) is enough to justify using guerilla warfare against these fuckers. We need to start documenting, sniffing out, exploiting, and flooding the APIs of all these ad driven sites till they become unusable. Just claim we are doing AI research. If I have to switch to command line web browsing, webscraping, and undocumented API calls via scripting to not see ads then so fucking be it.
Retvrn. Are there any other fellow Hexbear 9 enjoyers?
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YESSSSS
There are some of us
Plan 9 represents a lost future and a step toward communism, this is not a bit
Living in a world where everything is connected and computing resources are shared for the betterment of humanity would be so fucking cool.
Right? I'd love to get my hands on an East German Robotron PC 1715, it just looks so good
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Can you bare metal plan9 on anything? I have only ever seen it in vm.
That screenshot was actually taken on bare metal running on an old laptop of mine! Everything works great as long as you don't need a modern web browser or WiFi for anything. I've also gotten it running on a bunch of other random hardware I've had laying around. It's very portable and works fairly well on everything I've messed around with. Also currently waiting for my 10 gig NIC to arrive so I can use an old machine as a router running 9.
Also, yes Mozilla, I'm sure the reason people aren't switching to Firefox is because it lacks good advertising support.
100%, Google is leaning into Mozilla to make this happen.
Since they acquiesced to pressure and included DRM in the browser Mozilla has morphed into a long con exit scam for tech grifters. I find ex mozilla dev and founder jwz pretty insufferable but he was kind of right about the company and foundation. People gave them a pass for far too long. They took the google money, built an inflated non-prof using donations, and now have like the 2nd or 3rd CEO trying to scrape what little value is left there into a golden parachute. Firefox is a really small team at Mozilla. It basically exists to collect Google money.
Fuck the ad-based Internet right back to the putrid hole it came from. The second uBO stops working is the second I stop using that browser.
I wasn't always this way. I used to not block ads to help support creators. I used to have ads on my website 15 years ago. And for this transgression, I sincerely apologize.
Now I make money at my day job and everything I post, which is a substantial amount, is free and untracked (except for 5 days of web server request logs).
Sure I can't write full time with this model, but we're billions of people. If we each just made 10 minutes of good content a week, that's more than we can possibly consume.
And I'd rather have more good content than I could possibly read than the mountains of AI-generated SEO tripe that advertising brings.
Welp, time to start figuring out how to use Gemini (or alternatively RETVRN to Gopher).
In reality, the best parts of the web are (and have always been) text-based. I mean, obviously we have lots of fun with our emotes on Hexbear, but the essential feature is being able to communicate with each other via text. My favorite little corners of the internet are inevitably someone's niche blog or fansite which is almost 100% text-based. And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
Completely agree! I like to limit myself to HTTP 1.1 and any website I'll ever make will just be simple handwritten HTML with some CSS. I like to use elinks and xlinks for hypertext but in some cases -- like lemmy -- I'm unfortunately forced to use a bloated browser that supports JabbaScript and black magic (which makes no sense because online forums, message boards, blogs, wikis, etc. in the past all used to work without any JS). I like Gopher/Gemini a lot but I find it hard to discover interesting holes/capsules.
I used text-only browsers back when web2.0 shit was just getting started for years and I am prepared to go back to them. We don’t need any of this. We never have.
And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
This is correct but it is such a frustratingly hard sell to a younger generation, in my experience. Every god damn thing is in Discord now, a glorified IRC server with less security (somehow!) and minimal if any capabilities for locally hosted backups, and no one gives a shit lol. Decades of YouTube videos can not be archived, but it doesn’t matter. Hit that little bell icon, gamers
I tried Gemini once, honestly found Gopher to be noticeably superior, and on several fronts.
Gemini feels like someone was throwing a tantrum at the modern web and decided to overcompensate by rolling progress back like 45 years to Web 0.0001255 Standards.
How so? I'm going to tinker with both regardless, but I'm curious to know what you found lacking with Gemini so that I can evaluate it with a more critical eye.
Mostly that even for something three decades newer, it does nothing with the newness except bad things: it doesn't allow for more than one (1) link per paragraph, if at all. Doesn't have a concept of text alignment, text weight, spacing, italics, underline or any of the other stuff CSS 0.1 inherited from the historical printing press. To my recollection, doesn't even allow you to use any alphabet set that is not English's one (so stuff like math equations are out of the question), and you can't post a link that has international characters (like the wikipedia page for "Ñandú") without hideously percent-escaping them. In 2024.
In exchange, Gemini seems to require SSL and a certificate of all things, which means it's a lot costlier to implement on low-end hardware and it's noticeably vulnerable to tactics like domain seizure because you need a valid cert which means you need an external "naming authority".
Looking at it from a distance, it feels like someone looked a Gopher and went "I wonder how would this feel in the format of a brutalist buttplug".
On the plus side tho, thanks to the lack of anything even resembling formatting, Gemini does realize one thing that I don't recall Gopher realizing in full: rendering of the document is under control of the viewer, not of the author. For good or bad.
I'm dumb. So does Gemini feel like 1998 internet, or something even earlier?
Another thing I like about Gopher is that it was designed essentially to be a mounted read-only networked filesystem. Works well with the whole UNIX philosophy of "everything is a file".
Oh I didn't recall that part, might have to relearn some things of Ye Olde Gooden Times, but if so, that's wonderful!
Perhaps there is something like mount.gopher in the AUR already....?
I understand that a high quality web browser in this modern age is really expensive to develop. Mozilla, which is like an ant compared to the gorillas called Apple and Google, needs to find the funds it takes to develop that browser and pay the people who work on it.
That said, it's really the bigger picture here that's totally fucked. The web browser is supposed to be a tool for the user, not for the advertiser. I don't give a shit about someone else's advertising, or their ability to reach me and to target my attention span. But in many ways the advertising model props up the entirety of the modern web as we know it. It's kind of a condemnation of the entire ecosystem, but I don't know if anyone has thought of a sustainable alternative model.
Further, I view it as a kind of condemnation of the modern WWW that web browsers must be so complex. It feels like half of the development of web browsers is just based on supporting advertising in some way or another, and making sure the 700 ad scripts that run when you load a page don't bring the browser to a screeching halt (a form of supporting advertising). Another 25% is dedicated to making sure crap web frameworks like React run well.
There is real innovation in the web browsing space. Wasm, WebGL, and so on. The fact that you can play a fully interactive 3d game in your web browser without having to download and run it locally is impressive. But is it all really worthwhile?
The worst thing is I don't have an answer to any of this. I realize most of this stuff is extremely dumb and pointless, but it feels like the Internet has been totally overwhelmed with AI spam, shitty websites that necessitate javascript to even view them for basic information, and endless ad and user tracking. This announcement is especially rich because Firefox is still both better than Chrome & basically second class compared to it. Many web devs (or their employers) treat Chrome like the standard and Firefox as an afterthought. I just imagine now Mozilla taking that beautiful little fire fox and caging it and poking it with cattle prods to see if it can find new ways to make its ember glow.
I'd love for an alternative to the WWW to spring up, and you'd think something like the Gemini protocol could be it. But if you've ever used it, you'd realize it kind of sucks to use. A website like hexbear wouldn't even be possible on Gemini. It had its heart in the right place but doesn't meet the moment, and IMO never will.
the sustainable model would just be the government funding it through taxes. there is no sustainable model under capitalism
It would also be sustainable if browsers just added less features over time.
The problem right now isn't so much that the browser is a monstrously complex thing (whatever just fork Firefox), it's that Chromium has 97% market share so anything Google decides to push becomes a de facto standard, and they use this position to push more new shit than a hobbyist org could ever keep up with.
i more meant the state of the internet as a whole, paying for all the servers and what not
Mozilla continues to do everything but make sure the product that people care about actually fucking works. Layoffs, investments in shit no one will care about (VPN, Pocket, AI etc.), and now wanting to become an ad company? Librewolf is a nice fork and all but the web fucking sucks now.
The internet is turning into an AI-generated soup that only renders properly on Chromium and tracks every one of your vital measurements to serve you optimal ads
Tired point but the only reason Firefox works is because Google gives them some number of billions per year to make Google the default search engine
I guess we've got to hope that the LadyBird project succeeds and we get a usable browser sometime before 2030 https://ladybird.org/
Not to be too doomer but this same thing has been tried so, so many times and it has failed/ been sabotaged every time. Every single one of them. Even this one is trying to do the stupid Apple-esque, Corporate Memphis shit on their landing page. You will never be able to sell this in the modern technological hellscape. We must return to the old ways, and I'm only partly joking.
Pack it up boyz, goin' back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protect us from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.
WHAT'S DONE IS DONE, IT FEELS SO BAD; WHAT ONCE WAS CONTENT NOW IS ADPack it up boyz, goin' back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protects from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.
2035 - E-readers force you to watch an unskippable ad for 30 seconds between chapters. All physical books are banned.
They wouldn't be banned, but instead they'd be like $100 and sold as these premium, artisanally-produced things to the few who can afford them.
Thus we return to the days of rote memorization and oral storytellers
This retelling of the Odyssey is brought to you by HIMS.
Arguably better than even books. It forces people to be social and have good memory.
“Thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this story, go to nordvpn and use promo code ‘you will never escape’ for 3% off”
Hear me out... what if everything you say and do, whether you consent to it or not, put on The Cloud and then regurgitated back to you as a quirky "AI" podcast?
The cloud was a mistake. I still think truly dystopian that the new Windows OS has you save things to the "OneDrive" by default rather than your actual physical harddrive. That type of shit is the realest consent manufacturing, structure superstructure, 1984, power is whatever that has the means to deem something normal-ass shit ever.
Honestly, that's where we're headed. I don't know if I'm going to be interested in scrolling through websites plastered by all the ads that are going to poke through the Manifest V3 ad controls.
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