An interesting piece about creativity and monetization in the blogging age. For those who think, based on the title, that this is spam or likely to be uninteresting: suspend your judgement and...
An interesting piece about creativity and monetization in the blogging age.
For those who think, based on the title, that this is spam or likely to be uninteresting: suspend your judgement and give it a read.
Thankfully you can install addons (at least in firefox) to prevent websites from fucking with copy/paste, right click menus, scrollbars, and other things. Putting a turing-complete language in the...
Thankfully you can install addons (at least in firefox) to prevent websites from fucking with copy/paste, right click menus, scrollbars, and other things.
Putting a turing-complete language in the web browsers was the greatest digital mistake of the 20th century.
I was also being intentionally hyperbolic for my own dry humour, as greatest is certainly up for debate. But I do fundamentally believe that the intermingling of programing execution and arbitrary...
I was also being intentionally hyperbolic for my own dry humour, as greatest is certainly up for debate. But I do fundamentally believe that the intermingling of programing execution and arbitrary information distribution in a single program was a horrific mistake. I'll explain myself below, feel free to just ignore if you don't want to get into it (as is fair).
Sure, the evolution of JavaScript brought the eventual end of its horrible precursors like ActiveX, Java plugin, and Flash. But that just adds more fuel to my argument that arbitrary binary execution has no place being directly combined with the information distribution, which was the primary purpose of web browsers. At least when it was plugin-based, it was possible to turn it off entirely. Any and all binary execution relating to information distribution belongs server-side or as a built-in function of a web browser (ie collapsible elements with strict bounds on possible behavior).
Media playback should be handled by media players, not web browsers. Program execution should be handled by the operating system. File distribution should be handled by the operating systems or other separate programs. Interactive chat should be handled by other programs. It was how the web was before, and while the immaturity of the stack was problematic, we 'solved' the immaturity by killing the seperation of tools, rather than evolving said tools to be better. If we teleported VLC/ffmepg and the non-video elements of HTML5/CSS back to 1997, a solid 95% of the non-enterprise-app problems would have been resolved.
The vast, vast, vast majority of Javascript written has been in service of servicing ads and collecting telemetry data to serve even more targeted ads. The over-under on never baking programmability into the browser universally would be a net win in that regard, for that reason alone.
Thinking about every single website I visit, outside of video sites like Youtube and Netflix, not a single one couldn't be implemented without client-side programmability with minimal loss in genuine features. And video sites like Youtube and Netflix could function almost identically with a simple 'embed OS video player in non-overlayable window' mode.
I think at this point browsers are essentially operating systems with much more sophisticated sandboxing. The level of isolation they provide is amazing if you think about it and allows people to...
I think at this point browsers are essentially operating systems with much more sophisticated sandboxing. The level of isolation they provide is amazing if you think about it and allows people to run a lot more software than they would otherwise be able to.
While I can agree with you in theory, in practice it is very clear that at some point someone was going to make it happen. As you already allude to by mentioning ActiveX, Flash and Java plugins....
While I can agree with you in theory, in practice it is very clear that at some point someone was going to make it happen. As you already allude to by mentioning ActiveX, Flash and Java plugins. So yeah, might have been a mistake, but one that was bound to happen.
To add a bit of nuance to it, I am not sure if having separate apps had been better overall. Specifically security, as Javascript offers better sandboxing than most OSes do for native apps still today. If we had stuck with mostly native apps this might have been different, but I highly doubt that.
Finally, looking at the smartphone space, I am honestly not sure if the situation would have actually been better.
The difference between JS and plug-ins, though, is that for the most part you could opt out of the plugins and disable them if you wanted to. JS, on the other hand, is always-on. It used to be...
The difference between JS and plug-ins, though, is that for the most part you could opt out of the plugins and disable them if you wanted to. JS, on the other hand, is always-on. It used to be that browsers had a setting to disable them, but nowadays such settings are hidden deep where no user would find them (Firefox, for instance, has it in their about:config page). That is for a good-meaning reason, though; JS has become so ubiquitious that even pages that are just supposed to display text will break if JS is disabled.
As a technical user, you could indeed choose to opt-out and avoid a lot of the risks. At the same time you couldn't really avoid them either at their peak. I still remember government portals and...
As a technical user, you could indeed choose to opt-out and avoid a lot of the risks. At the same time you couldn't really avoid them either at their peak. I still remember government portals and the likes that would require ActiveX or Silverlight to give an example.
Average Joe on the other hand would just have all the plugins installed, including a few shady ones they didn't need. With all the security issues that plagued these plugins, I still maintain that Javascript is the lesser evil if you will.
And again, without Javascript I feel like there would have been a push for a lot of the horrid stuff that is now contained on the web to be native apps. In fact, that was happening. Just look at the fact that BonziBuddy once was a thing.
I am not saying that everything is perfect in the modern situation. But I honestly feel like there is a lot more nuance in the entire situation.
Yeah, there were points where you would need to use one of them for specific things (online banking in Korea was a well known example), but the other thing about plug-ins is that for the most part...
Yeah, there were points where you would need to use one of them for specific things (online banking in Korea was a well known example), but the other thing about plug-ins is that for the most part they would let you choose to load them in a case-by-case basis. No browser lets you do that with JS out-of-the-box.
I do kind of agree with you; it's better if the browser has everything it needs. I honestly think that one of the reasons why Chrome did such a good job of catching early market share was simply because it had flash built into it. And yes, all plug-ins were basically like drilling a big security hole in the browser, and that was even including the "good" ones.
The thing that I find bothersome about JS (and I think that @vord would agree with me) is that it encroaches on the things that do not need to be interactive and alters basic interactable widgets (e.g. form elements) in ways that tends to make usability worse. JS can be a great addition to a webpage, but there are some definate bad eggs out there. For what it's worth, I think that websites are handling it better as time goes on, but that just makes the bad ones all that much more apparant and egregious.
And I do agree, since we're already stuck with Javascript for eternity anyhow, at least it's no longer infecting your machine on the daily. It would still be nice to have no-javascript-mode as a...
And I do agree, since we're already stuck with Javascript for eternity anyhow, at least it's no longer infecting your machine on the daily.
It would still be nice to have no-javascript-mode as a mandatory option for any government service or designated essential service. Bake it into ADA compliance. Would do wonders for interoperability and scraping.
I'd contend that having the nastiness in app space has its merits: The nastiness is readily apparent and isn't masked by the legitimacy of the website leveraging it. It becomes easier to block and...
I'd contend that having the nastiness in app space has its merits: The nastiness is readily apparent and isn't masked by the legitimacy of the website leveraging it. It becomes easier to block and remove.
Spyware didn't go away, its just now a default feature and not an infection (snark).
In addition to what @Akir mentioned, the sandboxing you refer to was mostly due to just how utterly crappy Windows is/was. The posix-based systems always had better isolation, hence why almost all...
In addition to what @Akir mentioned, the sandboxing you refer to was mostly due to just how utterly crappy Windows is/was. The posix-based systems always had better isolation, hence why almost all subsequent operating systems borrowed heavily, Windows included. If it were possible to bolt-on that OS process isolation as a third party (as we saw rapidly adopted in the Linux world), the need for browser sandboxing would have been less extreme.
Pandora's box was opened, there's no going back, so this is all fantasy after, but if Windows never existed, and the OS that ate MacOS classic was a proper BSD with easy chrooting, the world would be a much nicer place.
This is a pretty good look at what the internet looked like before Firefox brought ad-blockers to the masses. Just missing the 10,000 popup windows that crashed your computer to go with it. I've...
This is a pretty good look at what the internet looked like before Firefox brought ad-blockers to the masses. Just missing the 10,000 popup windows that crashed your computer to go with it.
I've been running an adblocker so long that this blog post becomes impossible for me to read halfway through because it's triggering my PTSD of 90s malware. God help us if this is what the internet looks like to people who don't run adblockers.
This is incidentally why I run Ad Nauseum. While it rewards the ad-laden websites for putting up lots of ads, it's polluting the effectiveness of the ad data and making them much more costly for advertisers. According to the estimates, I've cost ad-buyers an extra $10,500 over just paying the impression rate since last resetting my statistics about 6 months ago.
Doing this, especially if a critical mass of users do so, will drastically increase costs for additional ad spending with much less to show for it, which will hopefully make ad buyers further question the usefulness of paying a premium for highly-targetted ads.
The tactics also work for comments. If you want people to think you have a lot to say, just write a lot of words nobody will read lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Dapibus...
The tactics also work for comments. If you want people to think you have a lot to say, just write a lot of words nobody will read lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Dapibus vehicula fames ridiculus, lectus urna quis parturient. Sapien quis mi euismod duis potenti convallis justo. Accumsan accumsan ultricies elementum ante ligula amet. Nulla libero rutrum aliquet tempus; posuere per mollis. Est ex enim neque; vehicula integer sem. Ridiculus nibh gravida posuere curae nisi cras tincidunt ornare dapibus. Iaculis dolor varius ad netus turpis ullamcorper mollis vestibulum quam. Pharetra magna cras cras, mattis efficitur arcu. Neque aliquam hac proin, dignissim primis lacinia condimentum.
I thought this blog post was genius. Want me to tell you why? <yes> <maybe later> Seriously, though, I found the post genuinely educational and fun to read—don’t say that about a lot of blog posts.
I thought this blog post was genius. Want me to tell you why? <yes> <maybe later>
Seriously, though, I found the post genuinely educational and fun to read—don’t say that about a lot of blog posts.
An interesting piece about creativity and monetization in the blogging age.
For those who think, based on the title, that this is spam or likely to be uninteresting: suspend your judgement and give it a read.
I was skeptical but decided to suspend my judgment based on your comment. It is indeed more interesting than I expected. Thanks for sharing.
I recommend clicking the ads.
But I always surf with ad blockers.
I will turn off to support a small website as long as the ads are not horrifically intrusive.
I also always surf with ad blockers, but that's not a problem on this particular page.
This guy's blog is super fun, I especially liked the post about custom scrollbars.
Yup, very... uh... insightful! Never knew that scrollbars can behave like that.
Thankfully you can install addons (at least in firefox) to prevent websites from fucking with copy/paste, right click menus, scrollbars, and other things.
Putting a turing-complete language in the web browsers was the greatest digital mistake of the 20th century.
Disagree for a variety of reasons with that last statement. Also, I was very much joking.
I was also being intentionally hyperbolic for my own dry humour, as greatest is certainly up for debate. But I do fundamentally believe that the intermingling of programing execution and arbitrary information distribution in a single program was a horrific mistake. I'll explain myself below, feel free to just ignore if you don't want to get into it (as is fair).
Sure, the evolution of JavaScript brought the eventual end of its horrible precursors like ActiveX, Java plugin, and Flash. But that just adds more fuel to my argument that arbitrary binary execution has no place being directly combined with the information distribution, which was the primary purpose of web browsers. At least when it was plugin-based, it was possible to turn it off entirely. Any and all binary execution relating to information distribution belongs server-side or as a built-in function of a web browser (ie collapsible elements with strict bounds on possible behavior).
Media playback should be handled by media players, not web browsers. Program execution should be handled by the operating system. File distribution should be handled by the operating systems or other separate programs. Interactive chat should be handled by other programs. It was how the web was before, and while the immaturity of the stack was problematic, we 'solved' the immaturity by killing the seperation of tools, rather than evolving said tools to be better. If we teleported VLC/ffmepg and the non-video elements of HTML5/CSS back to 1997, a solid 95% of the non-enterprise-app problems would have been resolved.
The vast, vast, vast majority of Javascript written has been in service of servicing ads and collecting telemetry data to serve even more targeted ads. The over-under on never baking programmability into the browser universally would be a net win in that regard, for that reason alone.
Thinking about every single website I visit, outside of video sites like Youtube and Netflix, not a single one couldn't be implemented without client-side programmability with minimal loss in genuine features. And video sites like Youtube and Netflix could function almost identically with a simple 'embed OS video player in non-overlayable window' mode.
I think at this point browsers are essentially operating systems with much more sophisticated sandboxing. The level of isolation they provide is amazing if you think about it and allows people to run a lot more software than they would otherwise be able to.
While I can agree with you in theory, in practice it is very clear that at some point someone was going to make it happen. As you already allude to by mentioning ActiveX, Flash and Java plugins. So yeah, might have been a mistake, but one that was bound to happen.
To add a bit of nuance to it, I am not sure if having separate apps had been better overall. Specifically security, as Javascript offers better sandboxing than most OSes do for native apps still today. If we had stuck with mostly native apps this might have been different, but I highly doubt that.
Finally, looking at the smartphone space, I am honestly not sure if the situation would have actually been better.
The difference between JS and plug-ins, though, is that for the most part you could opt out of the plugins and disable them if you wanted to. JS, on the other hand, is always-on. It used to be that browsers had a setting to disable them, but nowadays such settings are hidden deep where no user would find them (Firefox, for instance, has it in their about:config page). That is for a good-meaning reason, though; JS has become so ubiquitious that even pages that are just supposed to display text will break if JS is disabled.
As a technical user, you could indeed choose to opt-out and avoid a lot of the risks. At the same time you couldn't really avoid them either at their peak. I still remember government portals and the likes that would require ActiveX or Silverlight to give an example.
Average Joe on the other hand would just have all the plugins installed, including a few shady ones they didn't need. With all the security issues that plagued these plugins, I still maintain that Javascript is the lesser evil if you will.
And again, without Javascript I feel like there would have been a push for a lot of the horrid stuff that is now contained on the web to be native apps. In fact, that was happening. Just look at the fact that BonziBuddy once was a thing.
I am not saying that everything is perfect in the modern situation. But I honestly feel like there is a lot more nuance in the entire situation.
Yeah, there were points where you would need to use one of them for specific things (online banking in Korea was a well known example), but the other thing about plug-ins is that for the most part they would let you choose to load them in a case-by-case basis. No browser lets you do that with JS out-of-the-box.
I do kind of agree with you; it's better if the browser has everything it needs. I honestly think that one of the reasons why Chrome did such a good job of catching early market share was simply because it had flash built into it. And yes, all plug-ins were basically like drilling a big security hole in the browser, and that was even including the "good" ones.
The thing that I find bothersome about JS (and I think that @vord would agree with me) is that it encroaches on the things that do not need to be interactive and alters basic interactable widgets (e.g. form elements) in ways that tends to make usability worse. JS can be a great addition to a webpage, but there are some definate bad eggs out there. For what it's worth, I think that websites are handling it better as time goes on, but that just makes the bad ones all that much more apparant and egregious.
And I do agree, since we're already stuck with Javascript for eternity anyhow, at least it's no longer infecting your machine on the daily.
It would still be nice to have no-javascript-mode as a mandatory option for any government service or designated essential service. Bake it into ADA compliance. Would do wonders for interoperability and scraping.
I'd contend that having the nastiness in app space has its merits: The nastiness is readily apparent and isn't masked by the legitimacy of the website leveraging it. It becomes easier to block and remove.
Spyware didn't go away, its just now a default feature and not an infection (snark).
In addition to what @Akir mentioned, the sandboxing you refer to was mostly due to just how utterly crappy Windows is/was. The posix-based systems always had better isolation, hence why almost all subsequent operating systems borrowed heavily, Windows included. If it were possible to bolt-on that OS process isolation as a third party (as we saw rapidly adopted in the Linux world), the need for browser sandboxing would have been less extreme.
Pandora's box was opened, there's no going back, so this is all fantasy after, but if Windows never existed, and the OS that ate MacOS classic was a proper BSD with easy chrooting, the world would be a much nicer place.
This is a pretty good look at what the internet looked like before Firefox brought ad-blockers to the masses. Just missing the 10,000 popup windows that crashed your computer to go with it.
I've been running an adblocker so long that this blog post becomes impossible for me to read halfway through because it's triggering my PTSD of 90s malware. God help us if this is what the internet looks like to people who don't run adblockers.
This is incidentally why I run Ad Nauseum. While it rewards the ad-laden websites for putting up lots of ads, it's polluting the effectiveness of the ad data and making them much more costly for advertisers. According to the estimates, I've cost ad-buyers an extra $10,500 over just paying the impression rate since last resetting my statistics about 6 months ago.
Doing this, especially if a critical mass of users do so, will drastically increase costs for additional ad spending with much less to show for it, which will hopefully make ad buyers further question the usefulness of paying a premium for highly-targetted ads.
The tactics also work for comments. If you want people to think you have a lot to say, just write a lot of words nobody will read lorem ipsum odor amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Dapibus vehicula fames ridiculus, lectus urna quis parturient. Sapien quis mi euismod duis potenti convallis justo. Accumsan accumsan ultricies elementum ante ligula amet. Nulla libero rutrum aliquet tempus; posuere per mollis. Est ex enim neque; vehicula integer sem. Ridiculus nibh gravida posuere curae nisi cras tincidunt ornare dapibus. Iaculis dolor varius ad netus turpis ullamcorper mollis vestibulum quam. Pharetra magna cras cras, mattis efficitur arcu. Neque aliquam hac proin, dignissim primis lacinia condimentum.
I enjoyed this comment. Very insightful. ;)
I thought this blog post was genius. Want me to tell you why? <yes> <maybe later>
Seriously, though, I found the post genuinely educational and fun to read—don’t say that about a lot of blog posts.
I think you might have stopped reading a little too early.
Yeah.... you might have missed a thing or two :)