The end of the web browser

[hruodr]

I am using now a Samsung nc10, Intel n270 cpu with OpenBSD 7.2. Firefox is not anymore in the packages. All graphical Browsers seg faults, have strange behaviour, are slow or have problems retrieving Web-sites, including chrome. It is a headache. With FreeBSD 12 we have similar problems, firefox is there, but not chrome. And firefox is not enough for every Web-Site. It seems, Web Sites are "optimized" for the last version of android with a smartphone not older that 1 year. Everything is getting difficult with a normal PC with a normal browser. The future is the smartphone.

 

[Alain De Vos]

Lately i wanted to read my yahoo mails with the "elinks" browser. It was a no-go.
Firefox works good on my Rapsberry PI 4. I can view 99% of all webpages.
I have also luakit & otterbrowser.

 

[hruodr]

I can view 99% of all webpages.

I complained to my bank, because the online banking was not anymore possible with firefox. The answer was to set the resolution higher, and that supposed that I have a monitor with higher resolution. They simply do not care if I can do online banking with a normal PC and a "standard" browser. Of course, they offer an App for making online banking in the (most modern) smartphone. I find the idea to do online banking in a smartphone ugly.

I think, everybody has the experience that browsers hangs more and more due to scripts running in it (circles). They source out the (mostly unnecessary) processing to the client, to the browser in a most modern smartphone.

 

[mer]

freebsd 13.x, quarterly packages have firefox 109 and chromium 109.
# pkg upgrade -n | grep -i fire
firefox: 108.0.1,2 -> 109.0_1,2
# pkg upgrade -n | grep -i chrom
chromium: 108.0.5359.124 -> 109.0.5414.74

I have not yet upgraded this system, but another one has been upgraded I have not seen problems like segfaults and such.
As long as a website is written in standards compliant HTML and not using plugins/addons tied to specific OS, it should run fine. At least that has been my experience.

 

[gotnull]

I have not seen problems like segfaults and such.

Same thing for me, everything work as normal.
Note that I do not use Chromium or any fork of it, only Firefox.
Just want to add that when I do any Bank operation with FF I do create a new profile with firefox --ProfileManager without any extension, that way I avoid problems. The new profile get deleted once I am done with the Bank operation.
Otherwise I noticed that the profile I use for normal web browsing might cause problems, I don't know if it's because of the FF parameters or extensions.

EDIT:
grammar

 

[Voltaire]

According to research, websites currently load twice as slow on the average mobile phone as they did 8 years ago. According to research, there is no real difference on desktops compared to 8 years ago, websites load on current desktops about as fast as before. The conclusion of this story is that in terms of surf performance, desktops have now become better than mobile phones.

As desktop hardware I only use budget parts from 11 years ago in combination with an EVO 500GB SSD. What I see in benchmarks is that the current smartphone flagships perform much higher in JavaScript, but in CSS, HTML and WASM they score very similar to my old desktop, and indeed sometimes the new flagships score lower in these domains than my old budget desktop.

I would contradict your statement with these facts. The BSD systems are somewhat behind in terms of browser options. On FreeBSD you mainly have Chromium and Firefox, all the other browsers present in the FreeBSD repos are not at the level of being suitable for people who do a lot of browsing. I'd like to see the BSDs collectively work together on a vision that keeps BSD as a strong option for surfing. For example, they can collaborate on a native port of Brave/Opera/Vivaldi/Nyxt to all BSD systems. Or one can develop a custom browser that is competitive with Safari in terms of performance and capabilities.

Then there is a last thing that I noticed and that is something that I saw when comparing the Sony XZ2 with the iPhone 13. The iPhone was able to distinguish itself mainly in JavaScript performance, but in CSS and HTML the iPhone was only double the speed, especially when I used Firefox on the XZ2 to do the test. But the remarkable thing was the performance in WASM. the iPhone 13 with Safari was only 50% faster in WASM than the XZ2 with Chrome. There is a difference of 3.5 years between these models, and the 50% performance difference is rather little in this context. There is also a high probability that 2023 will be the year of WASM and many older smartphones can still get decent performance in there from my observations. Old desktops are also more likely to achieve high performance in WASM. So WASM can give a second life to old hardware, if implemented smartly. WASM is mainly for websites that require a lot of computing power, in websites that require little computing power it is best not to use WASM.

But a major problem with the current performance of the web is that the web servers that forward the web pages have not become faster than how web servers performed 8 years ago. Have websites become more complex? Is too much slow (Python) code being used in web stacks? Is it all the cookies that make modern websites so slow? It's totally silly that web servers for mobile users have gotten slower instead of faster over the years.

 

[mer]

Voltaire your last paragraph is interesting in the questions. My opinions only, based on having been around this stuff for a while.

Websites becoming too complex. Lots of us here remember the early days when you had at best a dialup serial connection (56k anyone?) and browsing, especially early online shopping was painful. It was obvious the testing was done on the internal 100M network and it worked fine, but flash and active pages with blinky spinny things were painful on dialup.
Heck most current residential broadband is more than commercial businesses used to have.

Cookies: interesting when the cookies start leading to all the third party advertisement stuff, think Google ad services that also try and triangulate location to give "a more tailored user advertising experience" when we are all going "No, disable that, turn this off, AdBlocker this"

Mobile users. A smartphone is a different beast compared to a desktop. Tablets are basically smartphones that you can't stick in your pocket. Websites written for a desktop, don't translate directly to a mobile device, I typically avoid using a browser on my phone (I hate having to scroll in 43 dimensions, tapping 87 times to expand text so I can read it, etc), so how does a business make the same thing easily accessible to the multiple platforms, in a "cost effective" manner? I don't know the answer to that; I'm not a web developer, but I think there are supposed to be some extensions to standards to a server can identify the user is on mobile and should do soemthing different.

As for the OP and his bank; I have no answers for that.

 

[gotnull]

I'd like to see the BSDs collectively work together on a vision that keeps BSD as a strong option for surfing

Yep I would love this, it sounds like a good idea, but that would also mean that BSDs put themselves as a desktop alternative, I am not sure this can happen for real.
Even if I use it as desktop myself the main efforts done by the FreeBSD project do not go this way but more for servers.

 

[Voltaire]

As for the OP and his bank; I have no answers for that.

I do know why the OP is making this kind of statement. He says the following: I am using now a Samsung nc10

CPU 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 (32-bit)
Memory 1 GB (Maximum 2 GB)

This device was already very slow when it came on the market. It 'worked', but from the start it didn't work properly. If you think you can still do something with something that was already passed when it came on the market so many years later. The Samsung nc10 and similar models from HP were simply products that were so slow from the start that you couldn't do anything productive with them. I think the only reason HP and Samsung weren't sued for this was the price of these models. It was so cheap that many owners probably thought: I got what I paid for. But this product was throw-away society at its best, you could throw it in the rubbish bin after purchase without regretting anything.

 

[gotnull]

I typically avoid using a browser on my phone (I hate having to scroll in 43 dimensions, tapping 87 times to expand text so I can read it, etc),

So true, I don't understand why it is still a "thing" in 2023.
I remember back in the eighties the hype about those gadgets radio/tv all in one and that kind of stuff, customers were complaining about the size of the screen, now people watch movies on smartphones which have a screen smaller than the old gadgets and they love it.

 

[6502]

customers were complaining about the size of the screen, now people watch movies on smartphones which have a screen smaller than the old gadgets and they love it.

Similar with desktop monitors - read comments in forum that 24" display is very small, he wants 27" or even 32". And in the same time uses his smartphone all day to browse... 24" is not comfortable but 7" is.

 

[hruodr]

This device was already very slow when it came on the market. It 'worked', but from the start it didn't work properly.

It is a wonderful nettop, small, light, with an integrated modem that works without problem with OpenBSD and supports many frequencies. The only thing that makes problems are now web browsers. Why should a web browser be inflated to be like a virtual machine with own OS?

 

[hruodr]

And another bad experience: I cannot open local files with chrome.

A browser cannot anymore be used as a html viewer, be used to view documents organized in the own computer.

Should I run a local web server for that? Why?!

I insist: we are experiencing the decadence of web browsing. Only smartphone browsing will remain.

 

[chessguy64]

It is a wonderful nettop,

Dude.. take a look at the specs. Your hardware is crap. It's not wonderful, nor is any netbook. All these issues you're having.. are because you're using that hardware. I have an older dual core tower and I've never run into any problems with Firefox or Chromium. I do banking on it too. It sounds like your hardware is failing, and it doesn't have much to do with web browsers at all. Time to upgrade to a laptop.

 

[mer]

I've had no issues using chromium or firefox to open/read local html files. The syntax on the search bar for a file is weird, file:// plus whatever the slashes you need for the path. At least on firefox I can still configure the oldfashioned menu bar at the top which has "Open File" on it and pops up a standard file dialog. It has a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl-O which also seems to work on Chrome under Windows.

Now is it possible that at some point websites will be designed for smartphones? Sure. But I maintain that if it's standards compliant HTML it should still render on any browser. Will it render perfectly? Probably not because that's the price you pay when you design something to a specific output. That means it will look ugly by default on a desktop instead of ugly by default on a smartphone.

 

[kpedersen]

OpenBSD 7.2

And another bad experience: I cannot open local files with chrome.
A browser cannot anymore be used as a html viewer, be used to view documents organized in the own computer.

It seems like OpenBSD isn't for you. Try to use a less security conscious OS and you might find your life a little easier. A quick workaround for now is read their docs on pledge and unveil and then move your local files to ~/Downloads and try again to access them. It should now work.

Or grab a free Microsoft Azure VM running WIndows and use that as a web browser (i.e via RDP / VNC). As far as I'm concerned browsers of the current magnitude will never be secure and Microsoft is basically just installing spyware on their own machine and I am fine with that as an approach if you have a fast enough internet connection.

console/debugging and adblock are sorely missing on mobiles and thus they will never be able to replace proper web browsers.

 

[jbo@]

console/debugging and adblock are sorely missing on mobiles

I'm not disagreeing with the statement overall but just wanted to add that I experience no problems using ad blocking software on my Android phone (with FireFox). Works well (within the context of Web stuff - it's a ridiculous situation to begin with).

 

[kpedersen]

I experience no problems using ad blocking software on my Android phone (with FireFox).

Nice; it looks like Firefox for Android does have a "port" of ublock origin. Is there an alternative for Chrome or iOS Safari yet? I haven't touched Android/iOS for many many years.

 

[mer]

Minor detour from the original topic, but I think it's funny when a lot of people expect everything on the internet to be free and then install ad blockers.
Yes I do it too simply because third party ads have actually been attack vectors for malicious actors, I personally have had some with Javascript stuff that winds up trying to hijack everything, but "free stuff needs to be paid for somehow".
Like many others I run ublock or other variants and selectively allow on limited number of websites (which are still annoying), but I consider it a tradeoff: let the ads run and ignore them or pony up for subscriptions.

Anyway, just my opinions and you may resume your original thread now.

 

[hruodr]

A quick workaround for now is read their docs on pledge and unveil and then move your local files to ~/Downloads and try again to access them. It should now work.

Thanks. I was not aware that the problem came from here.

I use OpenBSD since many years, but not anymore continuously. No chrome came with this surprise.

After googling, I got the solution of running it with --disable-unveil

But would not be a better solution to have a good programmed browser and other programs instead of all these defense mechanisms in the OS?

 

[drhowarddrfine]

The internet is all about marketing and entertainment. Servers are not slow. The amount of data and downloaded programs during a page visit is what makes things slower as marketing's quest for more eyes continues.

All these things could be made faster but companies don't want to spend the money to have a programmer sit in the backroom working out what needs to be done to speed things up or make it work on elinks. Banks have to worry more about security as far as that goes. Limiting which browser they work on helps there.

 

[kpedersen]

Minor detour from the original topic, but I think it's funny when a lot of people expect everything on the internet to be free and then install ad blockers.

In many ways I use an ad-blocker because I not only don't want something to be free but I don't want it to exist in the first place. I want to restrict the flow of cash into it so it suffocates and disappears like a weed or a tumor. For example Facebook, MSN, Twitter.

Ad-blocks save me from accidentally passively giving these guys money through passing ads.

But would not be a better solution to have a good programmed browser and other programs instead of all these defense mechanisms in the OS?

Yes likely. But "modern" websites and a well programmed browser are mutually exclusive I believe.

 

[k3y5]

I complained to my bank, because the online banking was not anymore possible with firefox. The answer was to set the resolution higher, and that supposed that I have a monitor with higher resolution. They simply do not care if I can do online banking with a normal PC and a "standard" browser. Of course, they offer an App for making online banking in the (most modern) smartphone. I find the idea to do online banking in a smartphone ugly.

I think, everybody has the experience that browsers hangs more and more due to scripts running in it (circles). They source out the (mostly unnecessary) processing to the client, to the browser in a most modern smartphone.

Purely a business decision. Switch banks. If they cheap out on web dev. I'd be shocked to learn their security is any better.

 

[chessguy64]

Segmentation faults have to do with memory. He's using a netbook from 2008 with 1 GB ram and a weak CPU. Even if he upgraded to the 2 GB max, that's still nothing when you're running a GUI and web browsing in 2023. Why doesn't my 15 year old netbook with a poor build quality last forever?! Then he complains web technology has changed over the past 15 years and blames the browser why the memory requirements are higher to account for the updated technology. lol ? Not sure why everyone is pretending this isn't the real issue here and why he's gettting crashes.

 

[mer]

chessguy64 I don't think we're pretending about anything. We're focussing on:

The future is the smartphone.

Which I simply disagree with. I could be wrong, heck ask the wife and I'm never right, but in this space I think I'm correct.