DILLO LOSES ITS STYLE I've finally given in and turned off loading external CSS stylesheets in Dillo, my web browser of choice. More than half the time I seemed to end up doing this in order to read web pages properly, and the last hold out was with Wikipedia where the CSS there had some real advantage (although good old plain-HTML would have been better again). But last month Wikipedia switched to a new theme and now it's just another website with screen-fulls of widely spaced navigation mess at the top of the page instead of real content, when viewed in Dillo, even with CSS turned on. At the same time now the stylesheet hides the contents section in Dillo. The first problem can be solved by switching to the mobile version of Wikipedia at (for English Wikipedia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/, so I immediately changed the search settings to use that. But the mobile CSS also hides the contents section, so that still forces me to turn it off. I used to get more grumpy about websites breaking support for less full-featured browsers, but now I'm quite resigned to it. Dillo also seems to have been completely abandoned now by its developer, and the website even seems to have been hijacked by someone else after the domain expired, so it can't even try to keep up anymore. Links is still developed, it got WEBP image support added last year, and AVIF image support last month, but it also gave up on CSS completely years ago. Unfortunately the 'best effort' approach that these lightweight web browsers take just doesn't seem to be enough anymore. But I'm not giving up, I'll still stick with Dillo and just accept the ongoing descent of usability. Firefox often isn't very usable in many respects either, especially displaying to a remote window over 100MBit Ethernet on my 'Internet Client' computer. The cost in time to fork Dillo myself, something I have repeatedly considered, would be much greater than just the few extra moments messing around in broken page renderings on modern CSSy websites. Even just as an arbitrary programming hobby, it would mean a lot of time working on implementing ever-changing standards that I don't like in the first place, which is probably why nobody else wants to do it either. I suppose I should mention Gopher now, where these troubles can almost seem far away (until you find a web link, at least). Yes I do use gopher://gopherpedia.com sometimes, but many topics are better with images, and for computer topics like software, it cuts out the table at the top of the page which I often consider to be the only really reliable information there (I have pretty limited trust in Wikipedia, but that's another topic). Gopher unfortunately doesn't replace the web of 2010, or even the Wikipedia of last year. Maybe I could write Gopherpedia-style proxies for all these websites (my web-dl idea, basically), but at heart that's the same sort of annoying endless job as working on a proper web browser. In the end the people who make the web - computer hardware manufacturers up through to the people writing articles to feed into Wordpress - they don't think like me, they don't live like me, and they can't make very much money off people like me, so I should be happy for how much I'm able to get from their creations as it is. It's only really by accident on their part. - The Free Thinker PS: Quite appropriately, I think, I'm now going to turn off this old mid 90s PC and try to fix a shortwave radio.