DracoNihil wrote on 2021-12-22, 17:13:

I had no idea even something as simple as a GIF animation, or the VOGONS logo animation when you mouse over it, is supposed to take 165% CPU to process!

Leaving aside details like the browser's GIF decoding algorithm, CPU usage would depend mostly on the frame rate set in the GIF animation, your CPU model and whether GPU acceleration is working. On my i7-3770S I bought used off ebay years ago I'm only seeing single-digit CPU usage (4-9%) for this 30 FPS GIF rendering on Firefox. It appears according to GPU-Z to be offloading the rendering to my GPU. How is it on your end?
Unfortunately CSS animations, which is what the VOGONS logo in the index page is, are not GPU accelerated so I'm getting double-digit CPU usage when I hover in and out of the logo to repeat the animation continuously. Perhaps if they remade it as a JS animation and capped its frame rate to 30 it would use less CPU. But whatever, this is a really minor thing we'd be nitpicking, it's not like I'm hovering my cursor over it continuously.

DracoNihil wrote on 2021-12-22, 17:13:

I'd also like a browser that let's me disable client side scripting on a global basis

You have to accept that the entire Western world wide web is transitioning to a JS framework frontend-dominated cyberspace (primarily the React and Angular frameworks). I suppose you could classify this as the latter stages of "Web 2.0." The rapid increase in RAM requirements and to a lesser extent CPU requirements just to browse the web does help the computer hardware industry.
Interestingly much of the Japanese web still appears to be in "Web 1.0" stage (ie. little to no client-side JS rendering), e.g. compare https://www.yahoo.co.jp with https://www.yahoo.com, though I expect them to follow suit eventually, especially now with their surging laptop sales from teleworking and distance schooling, I expect all their businesses like in the West to exploit this fact and start pushing React and Angular frontends to their online visitors.

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-12-23, 00:42:

I believe it's the nature of complex artificial systems. As complexity grows, the ability to keep everything perfectly aligned erodes, gaps inevitably appear. Then one day you wake up and instead of a crisp perfect glass of ice water, you have a rainbow daquiri espresso with LED strips and a singing frog, wondering why you've suddenly got a headache.

Very well expressed. I greatly dislike that "complexity", 95% of which is totally needless and artificial. The plain glass of clear water is what I want and need, not the rainbow daquiri espresso masquerading as newer, better water. It's a terrible sham. Worse, even if you try your hardest to get that simple, plain glass of water, it's now impossible, for everyone else exerts their control over you, and prevents you from getting back the simple, old solution, and forces the new one on you, whether you desire it or not.

zyzzle wrote on 2021-12-23, 04:52:

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-12-23, 00:42:

I believe it's the nature of complex artificial systems. As complexity grows, the ability to keep everything perfectly aligned erodes, gaps inevitably appear. Then one day you wake up and instead of a crisp perfect glass of ice water, you have a rainbow daquiri espresso with LED strips and a singing frog, wondering why you've suddenly got a headache.

Very well expressed. I greatly dislike that "complexity", 95% of which is totally needless and artificial. The plain glass of clear water is what I want and need, not the rainbow daquiri espresso masquerading as newer, better water. It's a terrible sham. Worse, even if you try your hardest to get that simple, plain glass of water, it's now impossible, for everyone else exerts their control over you, and prevents you from getting back the simple, old solution, and forces the new one on you, whether you desire it or not.

Yeah, the entire Web ecosystem (browsers, websites) has become overly complex and overly resource hungry in the past few years. Decades ago I can browse most websites just fine with a decent S370 Celeron and 128MB RAM over 2Mbps ADSL, but not anymore. Nowadays I need at least 10 times more resource than that just to get things loading as fast as I used to. Not to mention in today's web there are too many places things can fail, and too many places vulnerabilities can appear.

Imho one point of discussion might also be that beside which softwares, version/brand it can be discussed about, many became so complex to mantain and need continuous upgrades that I suppose costs a lot of developers time and maybe many are used to the old concept these softwares were freeware by default (I remember at first when they were not "freeware" at all, then they became shareware/freeware and then what are nowdays a sort of "free with contracts/agreements/server services"). While the web itself became too much complex to render and I suppose that introduce the usual race for security upgrades and speed optimizations that seems more like a lost war, considering that if something get heavier and heavier is difficult to imagine magically a software upgrade doing miracles on the speed side, I wonder (just an idea/opinion) that much of the weight modern softwares has is not related "only" to their main task itself but the internal proprietary galaxy of services. There're many softwares where the main original task of the software itself seems lost compared to the amount of internal services that is installed and configured by default and I suppose help the software to survive but take a lot of resources to do that while doing what the software was born for, like an antivirus that has internal flags for ads, telemetry, statistics, whatever logics "to improve the human existence" but that sounds a lot like to a simpler reason to survive.I suppose nowdays when a software is free (and probably also when is not free) it will have all that sort of unrelated features that are complexity over complexity over frameworks, high level coding languages, all sort of external sw dependencies etc..

Firefox is still the best browser out there. The issue is that the Web so to speak has gone to shit, and making a good browser for it is pretty difficult.

That said, I use Firefox between my home PC, work laptop and mobile and I have great experience with it.

I used to be a hardcore Firefox user, but I do believe it has gone into the toilet. Even doing a simple update can destroy your Firefox profile and I have seen many sites that no longer work with Firefox browsers, because they render differently than Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, and others).

I think Firefox is good enough these days, definitely much better that it was few years ago. It is reasonably fast and perfectly stable, which is good enough for me. The lack of ftp browsing is unfortunate... but I run into this problem maybe twice a year, so no big deal.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2021-12-23, 03:35:

shamino wrote on 2021-12-23, 00:15:

I've started running into some sites that don't load on Firefox 68. That amazes me, and I really don't want to let it upgrade again.

Firefox 68 is pretty badly broken now. I'm not sure what thing web devs are chasing to break a web browser so quickly, which was probably pretty standards compliant at the time. However, a two year own version of chromium 78 did break on a site the same way as Firefox 68, so that was also interesting that when I updated both, both browsers were fixed. So something is going on. Although firefox 68 is pretty bad, not sure why'd you would want to keep it. It definitely was not my favorite "old" version. I think I'd try Firefox 52 / vintage Seamonkey again just to see if it can handle the problematic website better than Firefox 68.

I use 52 ESR on WinXP, but it fails to load a lot more web sites than 68.
I don't really like 68, it's just what came with my Mint install. I'm at the point where I expect newer versions to find more ways to annoy me, so I basically avoid upgrading until I run into breakage somewhere that I care about.

I don't know if they exists but it would be interesting to have an home computer/sw that translate the HTML5 complexity into a old style web coding format enough good to still be usable by very old configs. I understand it's not easy and something like that existed I remember in the old feature phones client/server Java web browsers, but I was thinking to something that a home computer could do and not server based. At the end its task would be only that and nothing else so not even a GUI would be needed, just the kernel and the translator.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2021-12-23, 09:02:

I used to be a hardcore Firefox user, but I do believe it has gone into the toilet. Even doing a simple update can destroy your Firefox profile and I have seen many sites that no longer work with Firefox browsers, because they render differently than Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, and others).

I never had the former happen and the latter is not Firefox's fault.

shamino wrote on 2021-12-23, 09:54:

the3dfxdude wrote on 2021-12-23, 03:35:

shamino wrote on 2021-12-23, 00:15:

I've started running into some sites that don't load on Firefox 68. That amazes me, and I really don't want to let it upgrade again.

Firefox 68 is pretty badly broken now. I'm not sure what thing web devs are chasing to break a web browser so quickly, which was probably pretty standards compliant at the time. However, a two year own version of chromium 78 did break on a site the same way as Firefox 68, so that was also interesting that when I updated both, both browsers were fixed. So something is going on. Although firefox 68 is pretty bad, not sure why'd you would want to keep it. It definitely was not my favorite "old" version. I think I'd try Firefox 52 / vintage Seamonkey again just to see if it can handle the problematic website better than Firefox 68.

I use 52 ESR on WinXP, but it fails to load a lot more web sites than 68.
I don't really like 68, it's just what came with my Mint install. I'm at the point where I expect newer versions to find more ways to annoy me, so I basically avoid upgrading until I run into breakage somewhere that I care about.

You do realize that the current version is 95 and 68 is from July 2019 right? 52 is even worse, that must be from, what, early 2017? I mean, how can you even judge the software's current state based on a release from almost 3 years ago?

Don't like Chrome but also have hit enough sites that don't work properly in Firefox to accept the inevitable and use it as my default browser for past 6 months.
and if I'm going to use a Chromium based browser may as well go with the main one

appiah4 wrote on 2021-12-23, 11:15:

You do realize that the current version is 95 and 68 is from July 2019 right? 52 is even worse, that must be from, what, early 2017? I mean, how can you even judge the software's current state based on a release from almost 3 years ago?

That's true but someone might ask himself/herself if that time is "a long time" for the web standards to change and to need new softwares, gpus, multimedia decoding hardware, etc.. As thought lately if I had a 70's TV in the 1995 I could still watch TV channels beside with those old not-flat CRT display but anyway perfectly working. Does the web need to change so fast so it will need so many upgrades? Where the user benefit from those changes? 😉

386SX wrote on 2021-12-23, 12:14:

appiah4 wrote on 2021-12-23, 11:15:

You do realize that the current version is 95 and 68 is from July 2019 right? 52 is even worse, that must be from, what, early 2017? I mean, how can you even judge the software's current state based on a release from almost 3 years ago?

That's true but someone might ask himself/herself if that time is "a long time" for the web standards to change and to need new softwares, gpus, multimedia decoding hardware, etc.. As thought lately if I had a 70's TV in the 1995 I could still watch TV channels beside with those old not-flat CRT display but anyway perfectly working. Does the web need to change so fast so it will need so many upgrades? Where the user benefit from those changes? 😉

Well.. You do realize that watching streaming content today on electronic hardware that was supposed to be 'smart' half a decade ago is troublesome at best and impossible in some cases right? So yeah, 3/5 years is a LONG time these days. There hasn't been such a thing as durable consumer goods for decades 🙁 Software is outdated even faster, particularly when a mega monopoly gets behind and starts bending/breaking standards. Fuck you Google.

Well, the analog tv channels on the cable here were mostly turned off this year, but if they hadn't been, you could've still used a 70's tv set to watch them.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-12-23, 12:19:

Well.. You do realize that watching streaming content today on electronic hardware that was supposed to be 'smart' half a decade ago is troublesome at best and impossible in some cases right? So yeah, 3/5 years is a LONG time these days. There hasn't been such a thing as durable consumer goods for decades 🙁

That's why at least for myself I never thought Smart TVs could have been a smart idea or at least not once the user will find that the "computer" inside the TV or external device follows more or less the same logic of any modern linux based portable devices, with the sw strictly connected to the short hw updates lifetime/cycle and might not see many updates as once the next hw will. And not cause it can't technically. There're example of ARM11 (ARMv6 32bit) cpu based SoC devices on which even last linux kernel got compiled (for example) where instead there're (many) example where much faster capable and modern Cortex A53 (ARMv8 64bit) based SoC devices never saw a couple of years of newer kernel versions compared to the first above (for example). And it's not only the kernel, it might be the API level, the dependencies, the kernel modules, etc..etc..

weedeewee wrote on 2021-12-23, 12:26:

Well, the analog tv channels on the cable here were mostly turned off this year, but if they hadn't been, you could've still used a 70's tv set to watch them.

Our old analog free air TV tuners were turned off I think more than a decade ago to use the DVB-T and soon the DVB-T2 standard, but still its lifetime has been impressive like the AM/FM radio frequencies. Modern TVs doesn't even have any analog inputs anymore. Any analog video/audio devices might need some complex and far from perfect analog to digital encoder to connect.

I just use Seamonkey, problem solved. I also comes with a neat old school email client. Underneath it is still Mozilla based and works perfectly. Took me a while, but I was able to startpage.com a way to install an older version of uBlock Origin that also works perfectly. Regarding web 2.0 I only had problems with one site, imgur, but even for that there is a solution which I was able to find. I keep it updated to the latest version and haven't seen any stupid UI changes in years.

I'd like to think my i7 isn't old despite being discontinued in 2015. "Skylake" itself has been "refreshed" numerous times by Intel for that matter even.

But, my woes with Firefox stretch even farther back than this. It always seems to be the same problem, memory leaks, about:memory's "Minimize memory usage" doing absolutely nothing, and the performance issues have not gotten improved at all, only progressively worsened. I can't even keep a tab open on Twitch's dashboard without Firefox immediately jumping to 100% CPU usage just because of some animated CSS thing I can't turn off.

Typing text into anything in Firefox also uses a ludicrous amount of CPU! And I can visually see this lagging as I type!

Moving the mouse around anywhere in Firefox's window ALSO uses up a ton of CPU time, even on a blank page!

As for the UI, what I'm talking about is the widgets not actually being supplied by the window manager anymore. Firefox is trying to handle absolutely everything with UI, I don't want that. The whole reason I have a window manager is so the window manager is handling that job! If I wanted programs to do their own thing then I'd just use my display server without any window manger at all! This is why I don't like GTK3 and ESPECIALLY GTK4!

I mean what on earth is with the scrollbars in 91.3.0 ESR? How is this even considered acceptable?

There's not even any buttons, the thing is practically invisible! And whenever I click on the thing, it just instantly moves to where I clicked rather than up a section. Even scrolling with the mouse wheel scrolls WAY too far now.

appiah4 wrote on 2021-12-23, 11:15:

You do realize that the current version is 95 and 68 is from July 2019 right? 52 is even worse, that must be from, what, early 2017? I mean, how can you even judge the software's current state based on a release from almost 3 years ago?

Firefox 68 is an esr series, with the last patch from August 2020. Many linux distros still make that version available for use. So not really all that old, and quite strange to get broken so quickly, when web standards don't just go away after each version. Even at my company, they offer that 68 version on their systems, only to find that many of the corporate web apps stopped working over the last few months.

Firefox 52 is significant only because that was kind of before the time they started ruining the UI and plugin support. That is when they lost many users to forks or chrome.

No we absolutely can judge this browser's current state (even on 91+) due to consistently poor decision making. Even version 91 is actually pretty terrible despite getting fixes. One step forward, two steps back. Chrome is not completely immune to criticism, or has its own problems, actually.

shamino wrote on 2021-12-23, 09:54:

I use 52 ESR on WinXP, but it fails to load a lot more web sites than 68.
I don't really like 68, it's just what came with my Mint install. I'm at the point where I expect newer versions to find more ways to annoy me, so I basically avoid upgrading until I run into breakage somewhere that I care about.

I understand that about being careful about the newer versions. But whatever happened in the last few months to break compatibility with any browser older than 2020 is likely going to be a challenge. That being said, I can tell you that I do not like Firefox 91+, as they are pushing more ads into the browser, and pretending "it's not advertising" a quote straight from them. Either they are going to have to stop pushing the nonsense, or I think I'll never use anything that comes from them again.