If this trend annoys you, check out A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites.
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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On the topic of load time, it didn't even mention the compulsory "prove you are human" Cloudflare gate on practically every website these days. Add 10 seconds to every visit.
That was a great read. I have worked at companies that lived on display ads and it’s a terrible, desperate business to be in. Personally I think branded display ads have always had zero value (or even negative value) and the better the net has gotten at tracking their value, the more this has come to light, the less advertisers are willing to pay, and therefore the more fuckery publishers engage in to try to survive. It’s extremely hard or impossible to deliver a good user experience under this set of incentives.
Thinking back to the print news era, a lot of the ads were local, which made them much more valuable. But now the net has snuffed out local retail too, so that model isn’t even there to fall back on if we tried.
I’m grateful now to be working somewhere that doesn’t survive on display ads, and that may be one of the big reasons I’ve stuck with this employer for almost a decade now.
Let's go back to gopher?
Read the guardian over the gopher protocol at my gopher hole:
gopher://theunixzoo.co.uk/the-guardian
Thank you for this, it makes for a nicer reading experience than their own website! Is the code open source by any chance?
Good to hear.
I've not released it because I hacked it up very quickly.
Unless the user is actively navigating, the header is dead weight. The header should hide on scrollDown and reveal on scrollUp. Let the content breathe.
This one I actually hate. Often I just want to scroll up a few pixels, either to satisfy a mild compulsion or to align the content so I can see most of it. This is completely ruined if the navbar pops back in. Leave it at the top of the page, where it belongs, not at the top of the viewport!
The iOS browser has always supported “tap the top of the viewport to scroll all the way up,” which largely allows for what you say: just leave the nav way up there. Last time I looked was years ago, and Android Chrome didn’t did this. Does it now?
It really depends on the site for me.
What I really hate is a table that's multiple scrolls long where the header row doesn't follow.
I feel your pain. The really good ones plan for this, some pop up immediately when you scroll up and that sucks. The proper thing to do (imo) is to wait for the user to scroll 80% of the viewport back up, only then letting it begin to slide in, and have it slide in at a rate 1/2 of the page scroll. I do like having it easily available, but it should feel like it's trying to stay out of the way.
I have this usercss:
[data-testid="header"],
[data-mobile-fixed="1"],
[data-remove-fixed="0"] {
position: absolute !important;
width: 100%;
}
main { padding-top: 2rem !important; }
Works well enough on most sites. And on those it doesn't, you can easily exclude.
Can likely be expanded, but adding just header broke more than it fixed.
At the same time, it needs to be comfortably thin.
I have said it before, and I'll say it again.
An adblocker is part on my security suite on my computer.
Ads can be hijacked to spread malware, and unless the site owner agrees to take both financial and legal liability for the possible dammage caused by their website I will never consider removing my adblocker.
If they agreed to take on the responsibility, I still wouldn't remove my adblocker, but I would consider it.
On top of three letter agencies, basically every cybersecurity expert that publishes a "basic tweaks" article recommends uBlock Origin.
I mean, even CIA recommends the use of an adblocker for personal cybersecurity. And one or two other US agencies too.
The FBI too recommends adblockers as part of general web browsing security.
What’s your preferred adblocker?
uBlock Origin is the gold standard, but you need something that supports the full version. Plain Chrome (and most forks) are not good enough.
Firefox, Helium, and/or Orion would be my top picks.
Ublock origin does a pretty solid job, I'm always mildly horrified when I have to use a browser without it. Is that really what other people see when they browse the web?
NextDNS + uBlock
uBlock Origin
uBlock Origin
Block Site - Whitelist mode
I have to admit, I hadn’t realized it had got this bad. How did this get normalized?
I browse with most scripts disabled, and have since JS was first introduced to the browser. What I’ve observed is that some pages contain NO actual content, or just the first paragraph, when I load them. I read what’s provided and move on. If the site is hostile to me reading their content they worked so hard to get in front of me, I’m not going to do any extra work to find out what it is.
Ironically somehow AI is making disabling JS better nowadays, because text/markdown is becoming normalized, so receiving a pure text version of a page is a thing again.
It is mostly because the bar is measured in time to display content (forgot the name of the metric)
So the huge about of bullshit gets hidden by fast internet and asynchronous jobs.
I think it’s “First paint” or something like that.
How did this get normalized?
The average user doesn't know or understand technical details, and don't believe they have any power to change anything
Also capitalism means a small number of assholes make most of the decisions for reasons that benefit them
Meanwhile people out here hosting websites on disposable vapes.
It's not all that impressive if you're familiar with microcontrollers. Running a webstack doesn't require much compute power.
I want to know if it can run Doom.
One php command can be a server. It's how you can easily test run a website.
Sort of, it's just short on internal memory so they mostly render on PC to the screen on the vape.
So no, it can't run Doom.
Funny enough, most JS-only sites (those who are empty with JS disabled) display fine on Dillo.
Btw, anyone has a example of a tracking canvas in html? Wouldn't it falsify the results, if you resize it via a userstyle?