2019-12-02 - The broken www ------------------------------------------------------------------- The last couple of days i've spent a little time on the full-fledged www again after a long time. While i was anticipating for some joyous experience, it only left me depressed and more convinced that the www in it's current state is broken beyond repair. Instead of using the opportunity to retrieve some information FROM the web, i mostly ended up fighting to prevent the unwanted spilling of a my own information TO the web. So before even visiting a single website, i ended up finding a proper browser, and installed some extensions to hopefully prevent all the excessive tracking, the cookie setting, and fingerprinting. And the funny thing is, with these tools installed (for example Noscript or uMatrix), it starts to become incredibly visible what all these websites are doing in the background. Of course in most browsers you could already see that in the "Developer tools", but that was much less in your face. And the thing is, the more i look into all the nasty details of these www sites, the more i feel the need to leave this www place as much as possible. When browsing the www, i feel i am a now seen as a walking beacon that has to be followed everywhere i go. Every step i make is tracked, and every tracked step is being logged somewhere. As a fun activity, browse a bunch of random sites on the web with a standard browser installation, and find how many sites do not load any resources from google or facebook. Those sites are hard to find these days. (Yes fonts from googleapis are also from google... good luck dodging those...) In addition, find some sites that do not rely on any Javascript, and while you're at it, find some sites that do not set cookies. Probably by now, you're left with a handful of html 3.2 websites that were built in 1998 or something :P Now, you might say; ooh booh, you melancholic twat, it's not the nineties anymore. Things change, so just stop whining...And indeed things did change. And they will keep changing. But I feel the current state of the www is unmaintainable and will change. For example it might change because of; - The excessive tracking, not only using cookies, IP's and header information, but also fingerprinting through all kinds of browser features such as the Canvas, or WebGL or name whatever element you can find. It's nice to know your browser happily spills the unique deviceid of your camera, even though you blocked camera access in the browser. When you are on the www, all your shit is being tracked, and it's being tracked in a much finer detail than i can even imagine. - The absolute overkill of running every single bloody thing on Javascript. So you want to click this button here? Well, it's not working without first downloading half a megabyte of our ridiculous bullshit Javascript framework which also tracks you every move. Because, you know what, just using a form and sending a proper POST request to our server doesn't provide our marketing people with sufficient information. - As a result of this, browsers nowadays are sending away more information than they are receiving information. And instead of limiting this, somehow browsers seem to insist on expanding the ever increasing amount data they can send away to these servers... I mean, why on earth do webkit browsers even have access to usb drives, or my clipboard or midi devices... Why do browsers insist to have background synching in place (Oh hey, we've created a WebWorker API, so marketing people can now spawn background JS threads in your browser so it becomes much more convenient to track everything you do on their website...) All these things are completely unnecessary in order to receive some bits of information in a browser. As said before, i want to have a Server -> Client relationship, where my browser is the client and a remote document is just sent from a server based on my request. As a client i don't want to be the one that's sending all my shit data to a remote server all the time so it can collect every detail of me, day in day out, year in, year out. Somehow though, i have the impression that at a point in the near future, people will have grown incredibly tired of having handed ALL of their data over to huge marketing companies for the past 10 or 15 years. And the current state; that you hide behind VPN's, install a whole number of browser extensions and other tools to prevent becoming a target for excessive data collection is not maintainable. Especially for something that was intended to provide a simple server->client data transmission on request of a client. At some point people will wake up and go back to the essentials. And the fun thing is that for all this time Gopher has been quietly doing this simple job pretty well, and hopefully will remain to do so in the future. Quietly... and under the radar... for the people who do care.