The Fucking Web
DISCLAIMER I do not mean to comment on the mentioned blog posts themselves: I use them as examples and rant the presentation format - a ill-minded modern web frontend.
§ Chapter I - loading a damn page
This nice blog post on medium.com takes more than 100 HTTP requests to load. It takes 5.65 MiB storage and 40 MiB memory, only to serve you 900 words of plaintext. For good measure, 5.65 MiB is almost twice 1 of the War and Peace.
alt text:
this is a screenshot of firefox “developer tool”, showing network traffic when loading a blog page hosted by medium.com. There are more than 100 http requests, in both HTTP GET and POST to load various assets, during which 5.65 MB of data has been transerfered in 11.74 sesonds.
Yeah, they cry so hard “we are not living in the 90s, it takes less than a second to load the page”. I mean, there are so many amazing things people do in the frontend, but the example shown here is NOT one of them.
Seriously, when I write a tech blog, my biggest pleasure is that the readers could take a few things away. I don’t want to hear
OMG! 🚀💥 This blog just blew my mind! 🤯🔥 Seriously, I’m shook! 😱💻Innovation at its finest! 🌟💡 Can’t wait to see what’s next! 🙌🏼💫#foss #linux 🤩👏 2
And the medium platform (and many others) feel exactly like this.
STRONG OPINIONS:
- if your site is not readable at all without javascript and css, then you (or your frontend dev) have failed. (Surprisingly the said medium blog works pretty well in w3m)
§ Cahpter II - accessibility
Now let’s see what it takes to prove to a machine that I’m not a machine: They play pretend that they give you the “accissbility” option – they fucking don’t.
First, it doesn’t work for my browser (firefox). Second it doesn’t work for them. this process is to get yourself “verified” with an email address and set a cookie, which requires no human attention. In another word this accessibility option, if it works as they promised, will only become a free pass for the spam bots, which the captcha is designed to prevent.
image alt text:
Screenshots showing steps to get around a “hCaptcha” human verification. The dialog shows a grid of AI generated images that are too twisted to be described in an alt text. The user is asked to “click on the images that best match the theme of the sample image”. In there menu there is “accessibility” option, which ask the user to signup with email address. The received email instruct the user to “verify email address” and set “accessibility cookie”, following a long text describing how this works [-SNIP-].However after all these hassle, the accessibility option still doesn’t work on firefox browser.
§ Chapter III - browser plugins
browser (firefox) plugins I have?
- ClearURLs : remove tracking elements from URLs
- Cookie-Editor : as name suggests
- Dark Reader : to save my eyes
- Mailvelope : PGP for webmails
- PassFF : Pass integration (GPG based password manager)
- Privacy Badger : block trackers
- Proxy SwitchyOmega : I used this to toggle tor, and also VPNs when I’m in the freest country in the world.
- SimpleTranslate : translation
- Translate Selected Text : translation
- uBLock Origin : I don’t need to introduce this
- vimium C : vim emulator
- [some zlib helper] : well …
- Tampermonkey : user scripts
- Tab Stash
- [Zotero Connector] :
- GNU LibreJS
- DuckDuckGo Privacy Esstentials : (currently disabled)
- [some m3u8 downloader]
this is painfully bloated (18…), but what are they?
- a few are my perks (vim, tab stash, dark reader, translate)
- several are for a thirdparty software (pass, GPG mail, zotero)
- most are plugins that make the broken www tolerable: {ClearURLs, Cookie-Editor, Pravicy Badger, Proxy SwitchyOmega, uBlock Origin, Tampermonkey, LibreJS, DuckDuckGo Privacy, media downloader}…
Like, I need to add 10 plugins that doesn’t aim to make better www experience, it’s only because the WWW is already broken in every single way.
§ Chapter …. the price you pay for free service
Take a look at stats from the aformentioned plugins:
- ublock origin: Blocked on this page 1,248 (10%)
- Privacy Badger: 3 potential trackers blocked
- ClearURLs: tracking elements in URL removed
- (network proxy monitor): 46 failed resources
On a single fucking page there are more than one thousands things that monitize your “free” visit.
If you ever host something that require non-trivial processing power & storage, such as video conference, broadcasting, cloud storage … you know this shit isn’t cheap. Bandwidth, CPUs, RAMs, SSDs are all fucking expensive. A streaming or video platform could easily cost millions a month.
Then think about this, you are using these services from google, twitter, twitch, discord … for free – and they are making good profit – tell me they are not explointing you.
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War and Peace in txt format is 3.1MiB. ↩︎
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This text is generated by ChatGPT, anyways you get what I mean. ↩︎
/log/thefuckingweb