firefox is not unix, it is something horrible

Yeah, I remember when I made that switch from DEC's Altavista to Google. And also using Babelfish as language translation service, ah the good old days...

On topic: there's a whole array of niche web browsers, mostly build to be used with tiling window managers on mind. So they are mostly keyboard driven, not menu driven and have a very minimalistic UI.

Nyxt for example could be such a thing, which might fit that gap some people are feeling. There are also others around, some already dead, like uzbl (which is dead and claims to be following the Unix philosophy), Luakit or qutebrowser.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVteSEjKytw
68747470733a2f2f6e7978742e61746c61732e656e67696e6565722f7374617469632f696d6167652f7377697463682d6275666665722e706e673f
 
The search engines I used were Infoseek, Lycos, Excite and Yahoo because those were in the startup page of the browser (don't remember which one)

First time I heard about FreeBSD probably browsing with Netscape Navigator Gold.
 
hardworkingnewbie said:
Nyxt for example could be such a thing
Click to expand...
Hi, I've tested Nyxt. It's cool! But I think using these weird browsers is completely dangerous and wrong. The problem with most browsers is that they don't pay too much attention to security issues. I never use a browser other than Firefox and Chromium for web browsing. The browsers you and other users mentioned in this post have a long way to compete with something like Firefox.
 
hbsd said:
The browsers you and other users mentioned in this post have a long way to compete with something like Firefox.
Click to expand...
Yes but how big is the Moz foundation budget. Huge compared to any competitors.
So can you compare any real open source browser project against that backdrop.
Large Google hush/antitrust funds versus multiple small projects like www/surf?
I use www/otter-browser as a backup. Do I trust webkit? Not really.

Problem is some people want minimal browser and some want Widevine and VR.
I want minimal browser that works at 99% of sites. Not 90% like Otter.
Screw browser DRM. Junky content that rots your mind.
You should need a Netfix app for this if they want to serve DRM. To let a cabal rule browser DRM is absurd.
Why would my browser even answer anything about my location.
I can't imagine what kind of audio eavesdropping is possible with modern browsers.
Too much feature creep.
Remember that setting that is No Popups?
Now tell me you get no popups. Ever. You have to literally turn off JS.
We have regressed in what we allow.
 
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hbsd said:
Hi, I've tested Nyxt. It's cool! But I think using these weird browsers is completely dangerous and wrong. The problem with most browsers is that they don't pay too much attention to security issues. I never use a browser other than Firefox and Chromium for web browsing. The browsers you and other users mentioned in this post have a long way to compete with something like Firefox.
Click to expand...
I have got a different view: the most important part for security is the HTML rendering engine and Javascript implementation. Browsers like Nyst don't have their own homebrew stuff for that, they are using standard engines being used elsewhere as well. So this really makes it for me mostly a non issue, because whatever upstream gets, will go into the engine as well.
 
RoGeorge said:
Not sure if I understood the complaint, but
Click to expand...
No but. You did not understand. You are not the fist that did not understand. And I explained it before without success. See here:

forums.freebsd.org

firefox is not unix, it is something horrible

Do you agree? If you find with google a pdf file, you cannot get the URL, because it downloads the file and presents a local URL to the downloaded file. In particular, you cannot do a bookmark to the original URL. Copy with mouse key1 in the results of google and trying to paste with key 2...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
After all, the bottom line is that some of us have used 5 1/4" drives, even 8" and further back, and started on the internet with Webcrawler, Lycos, and Altavista/Yahoo. Anyone in middle age is in that stretch. The thread was approached more as a personal complaint than looking for a solution. Take a blossom tea and sleep.
I wonder if the browser engine is no longer so important in the multi-device era and if it is essential to unify it, given that the business focus to strangle is elsewhere.
 
SirDice said:
I'm so frigging old school, I'm pre-Google! I also distinctly remember using Google search for the first time. It was amazing.
Click to expand...
Me too.
But I didn't found Google amazing. Because since then I used Altavista and was happy satisfied with it.
Because Altavista did what a search engine shall do: find me things - information, PDFs, Datasheets, books... etc
At university I found a lot of stuff for my study.
This was all over suddenly when Google appeared.
Google came, everybody was using it exclusevely, also because media brought it up as the first search engine there is, Altavista was useless within a few months and died after a couple of years aftrerwards.

Google don't find you things. Google shows you things what others pay for they want you to see.
(Ever tried to just hit the keyboard randomly on google.com?
You'll always get several sites, especially ebay, selling you
"wqraiojukpufwertfipogjubpikjbwnrtghkiojpknrtgbh" ?)
Sorry, but frankly, to me this is crap!

Additionally most people believe with Google they search the internet.
Google doesn't search the internet for you.
If you are e.g. in germany, it seaches germany, maybe german language sites from Austria and switzerland, but that's it.
In theory this is ment to be customerfriendly, because in most cases people actually search only locally.
But in fact this narrows the internet.
The more Google knows about you, the smaller your world becomes.

This would not be a real problem, if
a) Google would give you the chance to search e.g. in Australia or worldwide (even if a search request may last some seconds [old-schoolers may remember])
b) Google would allow other search engines besides metacrawlers searching on Google, only.
 
Unfortunately, Google search is very "optimized", censored, etc. For example, old pages go to bottom and you find mostly new content. Regional search is the other bad extra. Search method was much better 15 years ago. Altavista was good with one big minus - it loaded 50-100K content on its search (1st) page and Google did exactly the opposite (only box with Search button and title). Not sure whether Altavista was blind to understand why they are losing marketshare or there was negotiation between owners.
 
SirDice said:
tux2bsd said:
Firefox used to be very lean,
Click to expand...
HTML 1.0 wasn't as advanced as HTML 5.0 either. What's your point?
Click to expand...
As disingenuous as ever, SirDice.
tux2bsd said:
Firefox used to be very lean, but Mozilla (the organisation) twisted it into yet another bloated misguided monstrosity (exponentially worse with woke presence over time).
Click to expand...
It used to be very lean, it could still be very lean (and modern...) but they keep adding and changing shit no one, outside of Mozilla, asks for.
 
Firefox version numbering become very stupid with this 80...90,91...100. It seems at high level they have inappropriate manager and this is only one of his/her "ideas".
 
6502 said:
Firefox version numbering become very stupid with this 80...90,91...100. It seems at high level they have inappropriate manager and this is only one of his/her "ideas".
Click to expand...
YYYYMMDD that's what I prefer. Ubuntu's Stupid Sandwich 19.49 is cancer, people make articles/howtos/bugreports with inconsistent naming making useful tidbits impossible to find.

YYYYMMDD also helps at a glance you know when it was last published, you don't need to translate version to time.
 
There was "standard" - Windows apps X.XX, Apple - X.X.X. But the new Firefox method is most unpleasant: 88.0, 88.0.1, 89.0, 89.0.1, 90.0, ... Maybe they think big number means that product is very old, supported and good. I remember at least 5 times there were statements that "new Firefox" is 2 times faster than old version. And it was obviously slower than IE at that time.
 
Profighost said:
Because Altavista did what a search engine shall do: find me things - information, PDFs, Datasheets, books... etc
Click to expand...
Sure Altavista found stuff, but you had to wade through pages of pornsite links to get to it.

Google came, everybody was using it exclusevely, also because media brought it up as the first search engine there is, Altavista was useless within a few months and died after a couple of years aftrerwards.
Click to expand...
No, Google gave you what you were looking for, on the first page. Often the top, first, result was exactly what you were looking for. That's why people stopped using Altavista, because their search result mostly showed porn/spam links.

Profighost said:
Additionally most people believe with Google they search the internet.
Google doesn't search the internet for you.
Click to expand...
Google scrapes and indexes. And their way of indexing and page ranking, at that time, was far superior than anyone else's. Don't get me wrong, I don't like how Google managed to get such a big foothold on ads, analytics and everything else. But their original search website that started it all was brilliant.
 
6502 said:
Not sure whether Altavista was
Click to expand...
I also don't know, really. But to me it's simple:
It was the time when the internet become quickly popular to not-in-computer-interested people. (Some speak of the "dawn of the internet", because they don't know better.)
They just learned "Google".
I remember when Windows 3.11 appeared in german tv news "tagesthemen" the famous anchorman Ulrich Wickert said, that Microsoft invented the mouse. (Yeah, really!)

Most never knew anything else. They never asked. They never cared.
That's why not the best things prevail, but where the most money is in.
 
SirDice said:
Google gave you what you were looking for, on the first page.
Click to expand...
:-/ Since my memories are otherwise, doesn't mean I'm right.
Maybe in those days my perception was anticipated with other things, so I wasn't unhappy to found a lot of porn.?

What I do understand - especially in those day, when the internet really exploded - is the need to think about something to make searches more efficient and quicker.
One simply cannot really search the whole Internet everytime someone asks something. It's impossible.

So, of course, what Google does as all searchengines, it searches the internet, create, refresh and organize a large database and let the users search this database.
OK.
But what's NOK in my eyes is, that as a user of Google you're put in some kind of jail, which officially is ment to help you - what also would still be OK, because making things easy means to restrict - but gives no chance to break out of it, letting do you a search in Southamerica like as you were a Brasilian in Brasil.
What's including the technical part of it, collecting as much data about anybody as possible and noboday has any control where, what, when.

If you imagine Google's, facebook's,...etc. data were got into the hand o the Nazis ... they'd found Anne Frank within 5 minutes including driving to the house.
 
SirDice said:
I'm so frigging old school, I'm pre-Google! I also distinctly remember using Google search for the first time. It was amazing.
Click to expand...
I also remember it. It was a dutch mathematician that pointed me out of its existence. And yes, it was much
better than other search platforms. The innovative idea was to use finite markow chains to rank the links.
 
Profighost said:
I remember when Windows 3.11 appeared in german tv news "tagesthemen" the famous anchorman Ulrich Wickert said, that Microsoft invented the mouse. (Yeah, really!)
Click to expand...
My Amiga had a mouse, and a preemptive multitasking OS long before Windows became 'mainstream'. That said, that remark is somewhat understandable. Today there are many people that believe Apple invented the smartphone. In some parts of the US many people call any game console a "nintendo". Nintendo didn't invent the game console either. But it's all these people know and thus every game console became a "nintendo".
 
SirDice said:
Bugger. That made me realize I was on the internet before IBrowse was first released in 1996. And that happened even before Google existed (Google search first launched in 1997). I'm so frigging old school, I'm pre-Google! I also distinctly remember using Google search for the first time. It was amazing.
Click to expand...
I was in 7th grade when Netscape Navigator came out in December of 1994 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator). And I remember it looking pretty different from IE back then, it came with a WYSIWYG HTML editor that was fun to play with, and I finished 7th grade having become a complete convert from IE to Netscape. IE was a rather awkward browser back then, and did not render some web pages properly. Netscape fixed the rendering issues of the day. Man, those were the times...
 
Are you talking about your old & good days ? I've started playing with the "Olivetti Prodest PC 128" + MSDOS + BORLAND TURBO PASCAL 5.5. I really loved the Turbo Pascal. I was good and on the 90' I spent 12 hours a day on my PC without interruptions, just to eat. Only by myself I was able to create some videogames,like tennis and karate. I remember how was internet before Google. I used so much Altavista and Netscape as browser. My favorite tool for chatting was ICQ and IRC. I've connected some months after Internet came up.
 
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