draft0 - a shared blog by just some people

I've been thinking about what exactly it is that is wrong with the WWW and what to do about it. It feels like it became worse over the years. It's easy to make out individual reasons: Walled gardens, ad-centric web sites, bad mass-generated and LLM-generated at the top of all web searches, the lack of search results from small, personal web sites without an SEO budget or the malicious will to implement all the SEO tricks for the sake of it, egoistic algorithms (that push harmful and hateful content because it makes them feel good). Thinking about how these things became the way they are is sometimes interesting and may help by teaching a lesson. But it doesn't really bring us closer to a solution. I've had a few thoughts about what does, though. It's not as complicated as I make it sound here. It's just that I needed to think about it to be sure what I even want. And that is for the web to be made of documents with hyperlinks. If it is a text document, a searchable database, a set of image, a list of things, an article with pictures and audio samples, a video file that I can download and play, a tree of links to other documents or something similar to those, then it is something for the world wide web. If it is an application, it's not a document for the web. It's impossible to draw ab exact line here. But that's the general rule for me now. It's not that web apps shouldn't exist. People make then and people like using them. So that's fine. But that's not what the web was made for and not what I personally want when browsing the web. It's one thing that photo editors, t-shirt designers, CAD software, action games and all those things exist. You can use them or not. But it has become so normal that web sites are huge and require JavaScript to even load that sites started being huge and require JS even though it's not necessary to serve their purpose. And that has become normal, too, by now.

What can you do?

I've came to believe that there is no route to turning the web into the web that resembles my vision of a good web. It's not even just that I don't think that I (together with similar-mimded people) can't obtain the power to force the usage of certain software or to form habits in others. I don't think it would be a sustainable way with a lasting positive effect on the web. That doesn't mean that there aren't ways to bring others to use better alternatives to walled gardens, closed networks, sites with lots of ads and only 10 % content, sites that use dark patterns and search engines of the oligopositic type. You can promote small projects, share links to useful and interesting sites, talk about how you use the web, make it normal to use a search engine that doesn't only find bloated, commercial, SEO optimised sites. You can start your own projects, enrich the market with libre and other non-commercial software, submit pages to search engines with a curated index, create good content for alternative search engines to find. In this entry I'd like to talk about what I do to change my own experience of the web to the better, though, not about making the web better for everybody.

What I do for now

I needed to think about web things a lot before I realised how much of my own web experience I can change by making certain choices and how viable it can be to simply not use certain services. It's not a new idea to me. I don't do Windows, I use alternative front-ends to YouTube, I've used various unconventional operating systems on PCs and phones. But in regards to the web I thought that it's not that simple. Web sites are how they are and even nice web sites link to bloated pages with megabytes of unhelpful CSS and megabytes of maliscious JavaScript. If I use a browser that is fast and doesn't do JavaScript, my web experience is worse than it is with Firefox (I prefer LibreWolf, btw). Whenever I tried Dillo, Nersurf or something similar, or when I disabled JavaScript in Firefox, I didn't get along with at least some pages. It doesn't appear to be easy to simply decide accept that some pages don't work and just go on to the next one. There surely are use cases where this is not acceptable. But for the usual usees - everyday browsing and casual research - that shouldn't be a problem considering I already accept that some pages aren't accessible because I don't want to register with them. In a sense it's my fault that I don't like how the web is today. It's me who keeps visiting web sites that are like that. And I can stop that by doing some simple changes: Disable JavaScript and use a search engine that prefers non-commercial web sites in its search results.

Really?

Don't get me wrong: I doesn't feel like an improvement to disable JavaScript entirely. There are browser extensions that let you control what page is allowed to serve scripts and what you want to execute. I've tried that, but it's complicated to get it right and frustrating because you always have to configure stuff while browsing and that never stops. But maybe it is an improvement despite not feeling like one at first. I mean, quitting to take drugs to which your brain has developed a strom chemical dependency also is often a worse experience than continuing to take them. But also often it's worth getting used to not taking them anymore. It also doesn't seem like an improvement to only use search engines with tiny indexes that rarely return with the ideal search result you hoped for. Maybe this isn't a viable choice. I think there is no search engine of that type with a large enough index to recomment it for daily use. Those projects just aren't there, yet. But that may just be one more reason to use and support them more. And since they do get rid of all the sites that do things that I don't like, it could be an improvement to get used to using them.

What does that mean in practice?

Some web sites don't have any images anymore, some web sites only load ads and recommendations, but not the actual article, modern closed-plattform chat apps don't work, just as most other sites that can be calles web apps, keyboard focus doesn't start at the main input field, some sites aren't readable because all their styles are missing, burrying the content between or under thousands of things that should have started out hidden, on some sites certain links aren't working anymore, many audio and video players don't work because of attempts to prevent permanent file downloads, there are pretty much no ads. If you use a browser with a less than very popular rendering engine, add misaligned elements on many to almost all web sites, unreadable elements on some sites with unconventional styling and missing elements if they use unusual positioning options. If you only use a search engine that doesn't do commercial sites or whitelists desirable sites, add to that the feeling of trying out the web in 1995 unless you navigate to specific sites that you know contain what you are looking for. The web feels relatively small with a search engine like that. But even then it's huge. Maybe it's a quiestion of what you expect. If you really don't know what site you are looking for, use a universal search engine. If you have an idea where to find the information you are looking for, start at that site. It might be Wikipedia, Slashdot, Toms Hardware, an Invidious instance. The web is totally usable if you don't enter everything in the same search engine as a lefrex. I thought it was great at a time where we didn't do that. And for the rest (missing content, non-working sites): Those tend to be the sites that I wanted to filter out in the first place. So the endeavour seems to work as intended.

There are also sites that I would like to read that just happen to use a CSS trick or JavaScript that isn't supported by all browsers. Those are sites that don't pay a lot of attention to accessability design guides but don't have any bad intentions. I've made sites like this before. This article is being posted to sites that fall in this category. Feel free to contact makers of those sites to let them know that you would appreciate being able to read the pages. I know I should test a site in text browsers before publishing them. I never do. Nowadays I don't even test in any other browser than the main one that I'm using (except when using engine-specific style rules). We came to accept that it just looks the same in all browsers. That is something that web designers always wished for. And when Microsoft's browsers improved in this regard it felt like we were there. But it is also true that most users of the web use a browser with one of two/three engines (depends on where you make the cut and call it a new engine after a fork). I think it does still make sense to test a web site in different browser engines. It doesn't have to look great in a text browser (although that would be the best), but maybe Dillo and NetSurf. If you cover those two, you cover pretty much everybody and you don't even have to test the site in Firefox or Chromium.

So, what did I change? For work: Nothing. Corporate dictates what software I use for what. On my private laptop, I currently use NetSurf as my main web browser. I use LibreWolf for two purposes: Copy individual bookmarks or URLs from open tabs, and go to sites that don't work in NetSurf when I don't have the time to find an alternative solution. For chat apps I use their "native apps" although I suspect that they are all just the web app shipped with their own browser. For social media I'm trying out different mastodon/fediverse clients for Linux, which I wanted to do for a while anyway. For search I'm currently using various Searx/SearXNG instances. (I know, not that alternative. I don't want to ruin everything at once for me.) More than recently I deliberately navigate to a specific site instead of using a search engine and ending up on a site that I already knew. When looking for something on eBay, I don't find as many interesting things like before because the pictures are missing and I don't needlessly buy things as much now. When searching for some random information or doing some curiosity research I close many search results directly or very soom after opening them because they aren't displayed properly. So far that doesn't bother me much. I'm already used to having to close tabs again right away because of cookie banners and other popups that make it impossible to get to the content without finishing a maze and reading a bunch of things for at least a minute. Not I open and close more search results, but get my ansers anyway. On video platforms, I open the video in an external player. It's nicer to have the player of my choice with my prefered UI and my custom configuration anyway. Some sites simulaniously look worse and better at the same time. I may have to scroll a bit to the content and it is obvious that the page wasn't designed to look exactly like that. But at least I don't get any grafical animations, lots of side-loaded unrelated content or ads. For shopping my options are very narrow. I already stopped using Amazon for other reasons a while ago. It's really not as much of a hassle as people seem to think. But much more shops than I expected rely on JavaScript for purchasing or logging in nowadays. (Probably at least for a CAPTHA.) It's pretty much all, actually. According to my rule from earlier, those are apps though, and there would be better ways to implement those. So, I don't have a solution other than switching back to LibreWolf or an app on my phone when I need to buy something online. So far, I didn't actually need anything, though. For online banking, sending a message to my insurance, using the Wayback machine and I predict much more, it is the same. For some things I will try to find alternatives. For others I will realise I don't have to. For some sites that I want to consume for enternainment it's disappointing when they don't work. There are so many alternaives for entertainment in all categories. I have so many ebooks, web books, audio books, lecture recordings, podcasts, … that I would like to consume when I get the time and energy to, I really don't need whatever interesting thing I've just found or somebody has just recommended. But now that I know it's there, I don't want to miss out. So far, this has been largest part of my negative experience after switching. But I haven't been at it for long. I'm curious to see how this will go for me.

(tba:links to previous entries, external links)