On 05/22/2017 12:40 PM, Kent Fredric wrote: > On Mon, 22 May 2017 18:33:47 +0000 (UTC) > Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Having just recently allowed Firefox to upgrade from 45 to 52, I'm now >> hobbled with the GTK3 file browser dialog. >> >> It's horrible. > > Indeed :/. You're not alone, but what can we do about it? > > Its not like we have sufficient staff to maintain a "Firefox but with > GTK2" fork, heck, we can't even keep alsa support. > > I've gone to using other older firefox forks (palemoon) instead simply > because this march of progress doesn't seem to be delivering on that > "progress", only making the user experience more boring and generic, > and thus, more useless. > > "One size fits all, copy everyone else" is not a useful axiom to me. > > But at this rate, every browser trying to be "more like what the masses > want" will end me up having no browser that exists and works that works > how I want. >
I'm in a similar camp, using Pale Moon as my primary browser. I've found the ads and constant bombardment of Javascript don't make for fun, intuitive, fast, or useful browsing. There's much one can do to combat it, but I think what needs to happen is an anti-Web 3.0 (2.0 was the Semantic Web and the self-publishing boom) browser: a browser that focuses on the "interlinked documents" Web and not the "every page is an application" Web. I think there's sufficient demand for that version of the Web to attract attention. I lack the experience to tackle it myself, or I'd have started the project already. It's possible to mold an existing browser to suit that ideal, but it requires consistent vigilance to make sure new features or new defaults don't reverse the work you put into it. It's stressful, I see why people get tired of it. (shameless praise follows) Another alternative is the gopher protocol, which is slowly gaining a following. It doesn't fill all the same holes the Web does currently, but it could with a high quality client. Current clients are rather lacking, though lynx can be configured to work with gopher and even download images/videos to be opened by a custom program (I like piping images to feh). All lynx is really missing is the 'unofficial' gopher+, which adds a few more data types and allows direct linking to HTTP addresses. An additional benefit is Gopher -- being plain-text -- can easily be filtered and "blockers" could block specific things if textual ads become a problem. Many existing tools (like awk or sed) could be leveraged to make that happen. It's also stupid simple to put a "gopher hole" together, since it's just basic I/O. Even servers can be put together in ~100 lines of bash. It's a breath of fresh air compared to working with the Web, imo. (usual disclaimer that my views don't represent Gentoo's official views, etc) ~zlg -- Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer OpenPGP Key: 0x1EA055D6 @ hkp://keys.gnupg.net fpr: AE03 9064 AE00 053C 270C 1DE4 6F7A 9091 1EA0 55D6
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