frisky dingo wrote:The internet has changed a lot. Flash and adds alone have slowed things way down. Web pages are far more complex than they used to be. It really does suck 😵
EDIT:
So whats the problem?
+1. Running around on the web in ~'99 with 56k was much less painful than it would be today, largely because of those changes. Back in the day there was a lot less multimedia content, and what did exist was generally much more compact, due to the general limits that most people had on their connections (not everyone had dial-up in the 90s, ofc, but a lot of people did).
Lo Wang wrote:If people had even the slightest idea about the kind of spying that goes on behind the curtains while running a mainstream browser and all the bandwidth wasted in establishing unsolicited connections to "familiar", "inoffensive", "statistics-gathering" servers such as google's...it's grotesque.
Get a less compromised browser such as Opera 12.14, disable anything you won't be using, hex out all the junk and block every other offending host at DNS level.
Opera 12.x is/was great (and it's a shame Presto was replaced with WebKit/Blink/Chromium); just to point out though: they have released a more recent update, 12.19, to address Heartbleed. That's probably the last update that 12.x will ever receive though. You can get it here: http://www.opera.com/download/guide/?ver=12.19
I've noticed in recent months many newer script-heavy sites being problematic with 12.19 though - nothing has really flagged it (whereas running an older version of Firefox, for example, can result in many Google sites popping up a warning), but it is certainly starting to show its age compared to active-development browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox. In terms of objective security and compatibility testing, Presto no longer leads the pack like it once did, but there's still worse offenders out there (like embedded variants of Chrome) - with additional layered security (e.g. DNS filtering, script blocking, etc) its still not completely unserviceable though.
candle_86 wrote:yea I can't stand opera, it lacks features I use regularly such as cloud sync between devices. I have no qualms about my information being secure on the internet, to even attempt to make it so, is a fools errand. As for adds and such Addblock plus suits my needs just fine. If I want something kept private I don't store it on a computer.
Opera 12.x has sync, it's called Opera Link. It will integrate with Opera Mobile, and potentially Opera for Wii as well. Newer versions of Opera (post 12.x) are all based on Chrome, and have accordingly similar/common features with a different wrapper. I would also caution that ABP, despite its overwhelming popularity, is no longer the giant it once was - once they started selling whitelisting to the highest bidder it pretty much went downhill. There are forks which don't implement that "feature" - such as AdBlock Lattitude (for Pale Moon) or AdBlock Edge/uBlock.
The concern over "privacy" isn't really a matter of people not being able to steal your identity, as much as it is bypassing behavioral marketing/tracking, which can actually influence things like directed web searches and online shopping. For people who do a lot of online research, for example, blocking these kinds of things can actually improve their workload (the primary goal is bypassing clustered results); the same can go for online shopping, where tracking cookies are sometimes used by competitors sites to affect the pricing you're shown (this has been documented on travel websites). There's also a whole lot of bloat that can be removed by blocking this stuff efficiently, which would help with preserving a data allowance or maximizing performance on a given connection speed.
