I Just Call It “Diarrhea Code” When I Encounter a Website That Won’t Work in SeaMonkey and WASMs.

(Originally posted on Wordpress.com on August 12th, 2023)

I Just Call It “Diarrhea Code” When I Encounter a Website That Won’t Work in SeaMonkey.

When you’re not nice to idiots who make “Modern” stuff, like “Diarrhea Code”, they pretty much just ban you from everything.

It’s “bad” to be opposed to bloated Web sites that stick out a sign saying you’re not welcome here because they’ve made a mess and it only works in Firefox and Chromium.

The reason I call code meant for Chromium “Diarrhea Code” is because it reminds me of what happens to a toilet bowl after you had too much Taco Bell and Mountain Dew. Stuff goes flying everywhere, it’s nasty, it makes the paint peel off the walls. It makes the buttons melt off your shirt. And you can’t wait to get rid of it.

20 years ago people began to push for what the Web is now. Binary blobs that run untrustworthy applications in your browser, too much JavaScript, HTML files that are several MB long and impossible to read that call out to this.

And they criticized people like me for writing clean, readable, markup, which was parsed, displayed, and presented to the user, over dial up modems, in a matter of seconds.

In 1999, you could right-click on my site and read the entire source code of the page. You didn’t have to take my word as to what was in there. I couldn’t have hidden much in there if I wanted to. HTML 3 and 4 were clean and readable by humans.

People said the situation where browsers would “forgive” slightly bogus tag use or the occasional typo (which I checked for) was “unacceptable” and now you have Microsoft Azure pumping in stuff that’s barely even code when you try to pay your electric bill with ComEd, and Chrome, Firefox, and Edge happily try to make sense of tens of megabytes of that.

Today in the GNOME room I was somewhat horrified to learn that you can make a Firefox .desktop that can handle mailto: with a Webmail “provider”.

I responded,

"Webmail *barf*

They all have different interfaces. Piles of JavaScript, their spam filtering is not uniformly effective, and they almost always have ads and tracking scripts, or at least whitespace where the ads are supposed to go. Consider SeaMonkey Mail.

Now if you do load Outlook in Firefox, it tries to register itself to handle mailto: *rolls eyes* with a banner that pops up. Also, I have to lie to Google about my SeaMonkey UA with a pref to make it think I’m Thunderbird, even though the underlying Mail code IS FROM THUNDERBIRD."

Jamie Zawinski’s “Law of Software Envelopment” said that all programs expand until they can read email.

Giving mail to some garbage Web browser, which is made to run “Diarrhea Code” is only about the worst way you could expand something to read email.

Email belongs in a reader that supports POP3 and IMAP. Email should be text-only.

Sylpheed is a good Email program, but I doubt it could even handle GMail because of the entire OAuth debacle and needing to load a Web page to handle that, which sniffs to see if you’re “on the list” of allegedly secure “apps”, like Thunderbird, which just rewrote the entire GUI.

Someone already wrote why WASMs are terrible for security.

They have introduced an entire unique set of CVEs (listed in the monthly Mozilla patch updates, WASMs are roughly 10% of the attack footprint of the entire Firefox browser!) that will never stop, and they’re on by default in Tor Browser.

If you use a Web browser to handle your mail, eventually what they’re probably going to do is just rewrite the entire “Web” thing into a WASM blob which is so much worse than “Diarrhea Code”.

It won’t even be markup and scripts anymore. Just a binary program you can run it like it is, and none of your extensions (NoScript, ublock-origin, etc.) can act on the elements as they come in.

WASM is part of the Google trap to destroy the Open Web.

Widevine (Web DRM…I turn it off) and WASM are the warm up band for WEI.

And why wouldn’t you trust some skeevy porn or bittorrent site to send a WASM your way?

After all, Windows is a *very secure* operating system because you can just trust the operating system company that already has 95% of the total malware to make sure that WASMs can’t do any harm. 😛

And Mozilla can *obviously* make sure they stay in the “sandbox”. *LOL*

Even when they do stay in the browser sandbox, they can still do a lot of damage. They can spy on the user. They can mine crypto.

Crypto Miners that load in Web pages boasted that they were early adopters of WASM and they could use the victim’s phone or laptop to mine “Monero” at “70% of the speed of a native program”.

Turn it off.

Security Posers talking about “threat models” and “Secure Boot” in the firmware are just absolutely laughable in light of all of the new threats the same people, and the companies that handle them, stuff into everything.

This is worse than ActiveX and Internet Explorer. At least all you had to do to stay safe from that was find some other browser.

Now all Mozilla does is blind copy things from Google.