technology

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.

Get the Mozilla hater apology form out

Retvrn. Are there any other fellow Hexbear 9 enjoyers?

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.

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.

We really don’t need the modern web.

I guess we've got to hope that the LadyBird project succeeds and we get a usable browser sometime before 2030 https://ladybird.org/

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.

I'm just cracking up at all the people who were OMG HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY USE CHROME WHEN FIREFOX EXISTS THEY WILL NEVER DO ANYTHING UNETHICAL as if basically every company won't eventually sell all your data anyway. I can appreciate trying to use the Internet while keeping your personal data safe but it's also a completely unrealistic pipe dream. You can do all the open source homegrown browsers and websites with no script and ad block on a homegrown OS and you're still going to be tracked. Your ISP knows what you're doing, or your VPN does, and it's a dream to think they won't or aren't using your data for something nefarious. Your phone certainly is. Your bank is. Your social media is. Your deviantart or Etsy account is. You name it someone somewhere somehow is tracking you in ways you aren't even considering.

If you don't want to be tracked don't use the Internet. It's just so ridiculous when folks who live under the immense yoke of capitalism pretend like you can magically will yourself out of it by making a personal choice like using a different browser.

I'm gonna get flamed to hell by this post but I really don't care because you know I'm right. You aren't protecting your identity from capitalist exploitation by using Linux or an open source browser. There are certainly plenty of other reasons to do so but that ain't it.

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.

w3m it is

FUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK