Up to Main Index                           Up to Journal for October, 2012

                   JOURNAL FOR TUESDAY 23RD OCTOBER, 2012
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: The wild, wild web
   DATE: Tue Oct 23 21:42:06 BST 2012

For a number of years I've been quite defensive when surfing the web. Usually
I use Firefox with RequestPolicy, BetterPrivacy, HTTPS Everywhere and
NoScript. I also use Pentadactyl for keyboard navigation instead of a mouse -
mostly, some things like Flash and JavaScript stuff still need a mouse
sometimes. This setup lets me deicide what 3rd partly stuff I want to drag in
and what  JavaScript, Flash and other stuff I want to run in the browser. Sort
of belt, braces, duct tape, staple gun and safety goggles :)

Sometime it's just easier using Lynx.

Today I had to sort out some stuff using Chrome ... argh! I'd forgotten how
bad the web really was without my 'defences'. I had no control over what was
being pulled in or being pushed in front of my eyeballs. I had faux popups
drifting around the screen asking me to take customer satisfaction surveys. I
had bright and garish advertising trying to lure me in so I'd click on them. I
had nasty lag on one site because it was trying to pull in content from
twitter - or was it facebook? I had dozens of share me, tweet me, like me
links. I moved the mouse to get to a link and it was like a minefield with
random marketing words displaying popups if you went to close to them or popup
menus appearing so you could pick from a gazillion ways of 'sharing' - which
then covered whatever it was you were aiming for in the first place. Another
one 'idea' I saw was pop-us for 'other articles you might like' - nice but why
not just put it after the article?

I won't even talk about Chrome's Omnibox - at least in Firefox I could dumb
the 'Awesome' bar. Who's idea was it that browsers should have a minimalist
interface so that the address bar also doubled up as search box, progress
indicator - with various colours, padlocks and security indicators - again in
various colours, favicons and RSS indicator icons.

Mistyped a URL? Well instead of going out to the web and trying to find out
helpful suggestions we'll stop doing that and go and do a search instead... Is
there any wonder why so may people goto Google and then 'search' for things
like amazon.co.uk or facebook.com? If the browser is going to do it anyway
might as well save it some time... doh!

If we stopped doing predictive matches and pre-emptive fetching, stopped using
3rd party widgets and all the other non-essential[1] dross how much faster
would the web be?

Anyway, enough ranting - 7 days and counting...

--
Diddymus

  [1] Of course one surfer's dross is another's advertising revenue, sales
      opportunity, tracking data or shared/tweeted content[2].

  [2] I think advertisers must love social sharing - share a cool page or
      article and you're sharing the advertising for them as well.


  Up to Main Index                           Up to Journal for October, 2012