💾 Archived View for sud0nim.smol.pub › the-web-sucks captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:40:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-07-16)
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I know, I know, you guys wouldn't be reading this unless you somewhat already have come to this conclusion but a little bit of circle-jerking isn't too bad.
About a month ago I switched back to Firefox. I had been running falkon for a few months and then waterfox-g3 before that. I don't remember why I switched away from Firefox, sometimes you just get that itch to try something new, but I enjoyed my journey through alternative browsers.
Falkon was quite good, extremely fast and rarely crashed, but it faced the same struggle as almost every other alternative browser: ad-blocking sucked. It had a built in one but the majority of ads still loaded. It also had some bugs, such as continuously opening new tabs whenever you clicked on a mailto link, which was a bit frustrating.
But now I'm back on Firefox. I don't like the way it has been going, way too much focus on the VPN and pocket while still having a worse experience than blink-based browsers, though the latter is not really Mozilla's fault. The fact you have to crawl through the about:config to get custom css styling kinda shows how low of a priority customizablity is with Firefox development. Its a real shame too because the customizability is what initially drew me to Firefox.
I've gotten it to be usable, disabled the tab bar and added the tree-style tabs, which I don't like but they're better than the Firefox ones. It's nice to have extensions, dark reader was sorely missed and having a truly functional ad blocker with ublock origin is nice.
It really shows how broken the web is today that only 2 browsers are able to give you a good experience using it and only 1 of them can do it well. The web is bloated, almost every website you go to requires cookies and/or is pumped full of ads. Most informational websites were auto-generated or written by someone with no clue what they're writing about. This is especially true with tech websites and even more true in the linux world.
I shouldn't need to accept cookies to read a stack exchange website. I shouldn't need to sign in to most websites. I shouldn't need to run any extensions to get a somewhat private web experience.
JavaScript is somewhat acceptable for large websites or web apps, but on truly text only websites it's entirely unnecessary, yet it's present almost everywhere.
Search engine optimization has drastically worsened usability of search engines. I swear even a few years ago you could look up a given subject and a relevant website would be in the first few listed. But ever since people learned to game the system, you need to scroll down until half way through the page to get something somewhat relevant.
Nope
Ok well maybe, it's definitely not replacing the web, but it's self imposed simplicity is truly refreshing. There is a certain humanity to geminispace, everyone chose to be here. We weren't coerced by society and major tech companies to center our lives around this protocol. As geminispace grows maybe I'll be able to do less and less on a web browser. I see a lot of promise with mirroring websites to Gemini, like with Wikipedia, Though with non-wiki sites this is going to be much more difficult.
I think the spartan protocol is cool and definitely could potentially replace certain web apps, especially the more math focused ones like derivative-calculator.net. Of course you can do this with Gemini as well but spartan seems perfect for this use case. Hopefully we can create an ecosystem of both Gemini and spartan.
I think more people are fed up with the web, more and more normal people I talk to are saying disparaging things about it, but we're all still addicted to one or more sites or apps.