triangletoot.party is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Mastodon instance focused on the Triangle region of North Carolina. Keeping out jerks since 2019. Anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-TERF.

Server stats:

78
active users

#webbrowsers

0 posts0 participants0 posts today

#WebBrowsers picks of the day:

➡️ @timbl - Inventor of world wide web & web browser

➡️ @servo - New web browser engine, currently experimental phase

➡️ @librewolf - Fork of Firefox, emphasis on privacy

➡️ @WebKitGTK - Official browser engine in GNOME

➡️ @torproject - Maintainers of Tor network & Tor browser

➡️ @Waterfox - Another fork of Firefox

➡️ @Vivaldi - Chromium-based browser with extra features

➡️ @mozillaofficial - Maintainers of Firefox browser & Gecko browser engine

Having been using #Kagi search engine for a few months now, I’ve decided to give their web browser, called Orion, a go too, after being firmly a Safari user for the last decade.

Orion Browser uses the webkit engine, but has built in support for Chrome and Firefox extensions, which is highly appealing. One of the first extensions I installed was one to filter out posts which have subjects matching particular keywords.

It also has much of the tight integration for the Apple ecosystem, which other browsers fail at achieving because the underlying browser engine is (usually) chromium based.

I'd suggest is you are an Apple user, seeking a better browsing experience, but despise the chromium/firefox bloated experience, to go take a look at Orion:

kagi.com/orion/

kagi.comOrion Browser by Kagi
Replied in thread

@nileane Really nice to see you covering Horse browser for @macstories

I've also been trailing it out for the past month or so. It's nice - I like it. Not sure I could fully switch over to it until it gets a bit of support for browser extensions — I feel like I need my translation and password manager add-ons there.

Looking forward to see it develop though. Giddy-up! 🐎

Why is printing out web pages still so insufferable? Yes, I know, web pages weren't designed to be printed. Yet, there must be some way for browsers to offer better formatting options.

A gigantic intro image makes sense on the webpage, but not on the printed page. I should be able to embiggen or shrink text in the print preview view, much as I do when viewing on-screen. But we can't even get browser printing to stop splitting lines (top half on one page and bottom half on the next). There must be a better way.

Replied in thread

@alcinnz @sarahjamielewis

Ha. I was thinking I was busy and could get away with just the claim but I guess it does require some better explanation to make sense or sound credible. Apologies in advance for typos as I'm still rushed for time ...

It was back in the mid 1990s, working for a company that did postscript support for printers. They needed "web-ready printing" and you couldn't get that off-the-shelf, so I wrote an HTML parser and learned postscript and put together a layout engine that could spit out PostScript.

HTML layout was less elaborate then. It didn't handle CSS. Lots of web pages didn't yet need it, thankfully. Or Java. Not sure Javascript existed but if so it wasn't widely used, and didn't get a DOM 'til later. So it was an easier target. On the other hand, it was before they got serious about how to resolve confusions in layout, especially tables. I'm pretty sure browsers didn't yet agree. My recollection is that HTML 4 started to more seriously describe layout, clarifying some vexing lack of constraint, but I think it wasn't out when I did this. It's been awhile, so I might misremember what was and was not involved. This is all approximate from unreliable memory.

But nowadays when people make these things they may get Mozilla off the shelf, so I just mean to say whatever I wrote, however incomplete, I really wrote from scratch. So we could take in HTML and print it. Nothing remarkable now, but a bit more effort then.

Anyway, when I was done it randomly occurred to me I might have authored a web browser. In Common Lisp if anyone is wondering. At the company then called Harlequin. (No, not the Harlequin that does romance novels. The one where I made CLHS. Though its big product was raster image processors, RIPs, for printers, and tools for color matching across printers.) So, to test my belief about what I might have done, I wrote an alternate backend for the HTML layout engine that used the Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) to display to the screen instad of PostScript.

It was immediately obvious that I'd need to add hyperlink support. That's kind of essential for web browsers and I'd skipped it for the web-ready printing. (I can't recall if I literally ignored link anchors or just turned them to footnotes. I recall it was a case where there were multiple options.)

The other missing thing (there were only two major omissions I noticed at the time, though I'm sure others would've come up--I didn't pursue it as other than a fun hack, in the original meaning of that word) was that at the time all browsers had a panel in the top right that was animated when doing web downloads. (Mosaic had a spining globe, and others did something cute that was distinctive to the brand. It seemed essential to claim victory. More essential than Java or Javascript. Heh.)

So I got a Harlequin icon that Craig Swanson, either then or later Chief Designer of Communications at Harlequn, had drawn, and I dismembered it and rearranged the arms and legs in various images that I assembled into a sequence I could treat as an animation making it dance during page and image loads. It turned up some weird bugs in Harlequin's CLIM because we hadn't allocated resources (locks and whatnot) in a way that could be shared across threads. The Harlequin dance wanted to be separately running, but synchronized. So even though my browser wasn't a product we treated it as QA for CLIM. Probably Richard Billington doing that helpful support? Maybe not alone. Again I'm not sure.

But the work of writing the browser was minimal compared to the printer support and didn't take huge calendar time because it was already kinda done. So I claim bragging rights on an accidental browser. :) There's a dilbert about such a feat, and when I saw it I laughed and thought "yeah, I did that".
dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1

Maybe more detail more than you wanted. I hope it doesn't sound like I cheated in making the original claim. I suppose it's a subjective matter what counts or doesn't. :)

dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.comComic Strip on 1995-11-14Dilbert comic strip on Tuesday November 14, 1995, viewed using a simple comic viewer.

Since @loshmi and @jwz 's post about the #enshittification of #FireFox yesterday, I've been test-driving #webbrowsers suggested by people in response to my request for suggestions of browser alternatives. I thought I'd give a quick review in case anyone else is interested.

Suggestions:

@JayLittle Zen Browser

Downloaded AppImage of Zen. Feels very similar to FF, as it is based on it, but has a Vertical Tabs interface, which I don't like. I ran with it all morning, but it feels too alien to me. Import option only showed Chrome, not FF, but FF Sync is supported, and worked, so I have all my FF passwords, bookmarks and history. Gmail, ebay, Youtube all work.

@aspragg #Epiphany

Installed Epiphany from stock Debian repo. Very minimalist feel (which I kind of like). Says it supports FF Sync, but I couldn't get it to work - just displays a dialog saying "something went wrong". Gmail, ebay, Youtube all work, albeit with manually entered credentials.

@eliteamdgamer #Floorp #servo and #ladybird

Floorp makes you agree to a privacy agreement which is in Japanese, and I couldn't find an English version, so I have not tried. Servo looks interesting, but I don't get the impression it's "production ready" yet. Ladybird, as far as I know is developed by some rather bigoted techbros, so also not tried. Sorry eliteamdgamer, but thanks for the suggestions.

@IzzyOnDroid #LibreWolf

Installed LibreWolf from external repository (followed easy instructions to add to my apt/sources) so it will get updated with my normal system updates. Again, import option only showed Chrome, not FF, but FF Sync is supported (after tweaks in about:config to enable it), and it worked, so I have all my FF passwords, bookmarks and history. Gmail, ebay, Youtube all work.

So, in summary, I now have three extra browsers installed, and am feeling more positive about not having to resort to Chromium any more. I'm favouring LibreWolf at the moment, as it feels a lot more homely. Will continue flitting between all of these for a week or so, as I need to use other websites I haven't yet tested. I'll be surprised if anything flat out fails to work, but time will tell.

"Much more worrisome, however, is the similar deal Google has with Mozilla. About 80% of Mozilla’s total revenue comes from a search deal with Google, and if that deal were to be dissolved, the consequences for Mozilla, and thus for Firefox, would be absolutely immense." osnews.com/story/140425/us-jud #Google #Mozilla #Firefox #WebBrowsers

www.osnews.comUS judge rules Google is a monopoly, search deals with Apple and Mozilla in peril – OSnews

Please recommend a light-weight web browser for static sites with the following features:

1)Lightweight layout engine:
not one of the Big Three.

2)Dark mode: I need all pages to show a dark background (preferably true black) with light text. No exceptions. If I encounter a page with light-themed CSS, I want some feature equivalent to the Dark Reader extension that major browsers have.

3)Graphical: I want to be able to navigate with a mouse, not just a the terminal.

4)Not developed primarily by a bigot. So no Pale Moon (and Pale Moon's Goanna engine isn't really lightweight, it's just slightly less heavy than the big three).

Also note that I'm specifically looking for a
web browser with these criteria: for Gemini/Spartan/similar protocols I already have Lagrange.

#WebBrowsers #StaticSite #StaticWeb #StaticWebsite #LiteBrowser #LightweightBrowser #Web1 #Web1_0 #Smalnet #Gemini #GeminiProtocol #Spartan #SpartanProtocol