2025.05.11 | Home
After switching to the w3m browser in 2017 and then switching to Dillo after eight years, I feel like I’ve needlessly had to change another tool in my box just so I can surf the goddamn web… Twice! Today the “web” is a wasteland of websites that look like complete and utter shit in a text mode browser, and that’s when a site will even load at all!
With a normal browser, I find that almost every fucking site I visit is now whining about wanting their stupid “cookies” to be dumped into my computer while claiming it’s “for the best experience” and usually giving me NO CHOICE but to accept this (tracking) nonsense if I want to continue browsing their stupid spying website.
But then I can’t even get to the lean meat of the (often useless) content because I’m suddenly prompted by a near-full-screen popup that wants me to SUBSCRIBE to what amounts to little more than a stream of advertisements, excessive (ab)use of JavaScript and CSS and only a couple of paragraphs of actual plain-text “content” in a page that somehow finds a way to measure in the megabytes because of all the needless graphics that hog up the majority of my screen space. I shudder to know how many connections my browser has to make across the web to load such huge piles of garbage.
It’s true that I could just disable cookies and hope for the best, but I still need an ad blocker just so I can learn something on YouTube without wasting thirty seconds of my life waiting for the first ad to go away so I can quickly “Skip” the second (two minute) ad, only to be interrupted every two or three minutes with all the bite size ads that were cleverly made bite size because of how short of an attention span most people seem to have these days, and because the more ads you sprinkle on a video the more money you make whenever someone tries to watch what otherwise might have been a really good video, if not for the fact that these ads were placed on a mutherfuckin’ MUSIC VIDEO!
But then this still isn’t secure because despite disabling cookies and adding an ad blocker, my browser is unique thanks to the use of browser fingerprinting which can reveal a disturbing level of detail about my system, so now I must disable Javashit and find out just how AWEFUL the modern web really is thanks to the number of sites that suddenly break down completely or simply decide to block me outright because I REFUSE to submit to the will of fatass corporations shoveling shit down my wires while I’m being stalked like a deer as I wander the wasteland, and all for the benefit of their fatass bottom line while they claim it’s for the sake of “targeted advertisement”.
Fuck you, stackoverflow! I will NOT enable javashit AND cookies just so I can read what might turn out to be a completely useless string of posts that does NOT answer my goddamn question! Fuck YOU Reddit, I will not enable javashit and cookies just so I can read a string of useless posts that don’t answer my goddamn question. Fuck you, Github, I will not enable…
And THAT is why I’ve been using a CLI text mode browser for the last eight years, even under an X session where more useful browsers are able to work, and on a machine that has SIXTEEN GIGABYTES of memory that I’ve yet to ever come close to using to its full potential, because the modern web is a cash cow for lazy people and fatass corporations trading your online activities like it’s fucking currency, and it’s made possible by the likes of all the fatass memory munching browsers that enable all of the needless misfeatures which have been pointlessly nailed to a platform that was, has always been and SHOULD CONTINUE TO BE fundamentally built from (actual) CONTENT made of PLAIN. FUCKING. TEXT.
Seriously, people have been writing about this for over a decade! How much longer must we feed the dumpster fire by allowing this shit to go on? I mean after all, we don’t even need the browser for like, 90% of the things we do on the web anyway because in case you haven’t noticed or simply forgot that famous catchphrase:
“There’s an app for that”.
That’s right! Those bright-as-fucking-daylight brick-shaped plastic pancakes we all carry around poking at and staring at like a bunch of fucking ZOMBIES! I could be wrong but I think we call them “smartphones”… I know the famous fragile FOMO feed known as “Facebook” will fall flat on its fucking face and just BREAK if you disable Javashit in the browser, as will Reddit, and probably Twitter (‘scuse me, sorry Mr. Mush! I meant “X”) and I’m sure the same is true for that self-serving ego-boosting (DEL: illusion phatform) image platform called “Instagram” too…
But don’t you have the Facebook app? And Facebook Messenger? And also Reddit and Snapchat, Discord, WhatsApp, Gmail, Chrome, Firefox and even Instagram, which, you know… happens to be on the same device you use to take those goddamn fake selfies? And don’t even get me STARTED on that mutherfuckin’ time-wasting zombie factory, the omnipresent AD(D) magnet, the trojan horse spawn of Satan himself: Tik-Tok.
The same goes for YouTube, which might work without JavaScript (or Flash, or Shockwave… remember those?) if someone could just think of a way to play videos in a web page without resorting to methods that make it possible to spy on people and uniquely identify them… You would be quite amazed what the web could look like and just how much functionality would remain intact even without Javashit enabled, if we could just learn from the error of our ways.
And no, I’m not saying every website should look like mine, that’s ridiculous. But smaller and simpler web pages would not only load a fuck of a lot faster for those who don’t have the privilege of 500 Mbit/s fiber optic internet, 32GB RAM and an Intel i7 CPU made in the last year, but the browsers would be much smaller and simpler to develop (and by extension easier to secure), and people might actually be interested in subscribing to your content because you now have the space to fill the screen with like, actual fucking content that people might enjoy looking at, and on just about all of their devices!. You don’t need to choose one of those hundreds of fucking frameworks just to make a bloated, barrel-assed “blog”, and you don’t even need one of those horrible GUI WYSIWYG “editors” that spit out unreadable gibberish that somehow fucking renders a page!
Just put your actual fucking words into a plain old Markdown file, write up some small CSS script for appearances and away you go. Hell, if you really need something that isn’t provided by plain old HTML and CSS then you could add just a dash of sensible scripting, so long as it isn’t written in JavaScript, Ruby or even (god forbid) PHP, and is NOT a fucking Rube Goldberg machine of “Objekt Oorie-entd kohd”… Those Markdown files can even be translated to HTML using small and simple tools, on the fly, with CGI scripting, without ever having to touch another one of those fancy fucking GUI webshit-building bullshit platforms again.
Maybe then your stupid fucking website will work on all browsers and on all devices, because the browser can now be (mostly) just a document rendering engine instead of a fucking operating system inside an operating system. Seriously, there is no sense having a page that renders on mobile devices if the fucking hamburger menu doesn’t even work! I guarantee that any HTML produced by this workflow will actually be readable by humans, and if it isn’t then the fucking tools are broken, throw them away and write new ones because it’s NOT THAT HARD to make small and simple tools that produce human-readable plain-text output! Just look at lowdown(1) for an example.
And yes, this will absolutely work for a page with images too… but if those images happen to be moving for some reason (like when I’m trying to scroll) or worse, without my permission then I’m going to reach through the screen and throttle the mutherfucker who thought it was acceptable to take the fundamental concept of scrolling and play fucking jump-rope with it. And don’t even get me STARTED on those auto-play videos with way too much dynamic range compression, that also happen to have an ad in front of them and are now BLASTING garbage through a 200W Hi-Fi system with the volume cranked, AND ON TOP OF MY MUTHERFUCKIN’ MUSIC! And BTW, muting the sound by default does not count, fuckwad! Some of us are stuck with metered internet and throttled bandwidth!
Ever heard of sensory overload? Because with all the mutherfucking ads on my phone, on the web, on almost anything that can get on the internet and display a fucking picture, has it not occurred to ANYONE that it just. doesn’t. WORK!? Honestly the number of ads I’ve seen over the years is just astounding, and I’ve bought A LOT OF stuff in the last decade but have NEVER seen even a single one of those things in an ad, even when the ads were targeting ME specifically after shopping around for weeks without any of those wonderful plugins that block this nonsense. And apparently you don’t even need to click on an ad for someone to get paid, it just needs to be shown to whoever the fuck is so unfortunate to be using whatever device or service the ad was placed on, often in the most obnoxious way to ensure you definitely see it.
But then it doesn’t even matter if you actually saw the ad or even care what was in it, because the point is not to sell you things but rather to sell your information to the advertising companies. The ad economy has been a thing for years and only seems to be getting worse, and it’s all thanks to those fatass corporations that seem to think they own the fucking web (looking at YOU, big “G”) and think they can do whatever the fuck they want with it as long as it will turn a fucking profit. This is why any site that starts out good and gets a lot of attention suddenly turns into an ad-infested, information-gathering corporation-owned wasteland overnight. Just look at what happened to Facebook, YouTube, Github, Reddit…