Also, fuck xfinity and their BS. Can’t even change wifi password without downloading an app.
It’s because an app allows them to collect all kinds of telemetry and usage data that they can’t get from a browser. Browsers inherently limit what kinds of data they can collect by walling them off, while an app gives them full control over what they collect.
and allows them to incorporate any bullshit code they like in fashions no sane browser would accept in a thousand years.
And send you (usually completely useless) notifications.
And the app icon acts as an little ad for their company / brand
Yep…I use rethinkDNS to filter some, and App manager (require root) to disable some tracking components. It helps when u have to use an app
Fuck Chrome-Remixes, all my homies use Firefox to defend the free web!
And if you want to take the extra step use Librewolf
I prefer to use Firefox because with Librewolf, Mozilla can’t get telemetry data.
/s? 🥺
No /s. Telemetry is super helpful to gather usage patterns. I opt-in to telemetry on software that I value or I use every day.
I’m can’t be arsed to manually submit feedback so at least with telemtry they know which features I’m using and how often.
I totally understand, but I’m always conservative and skeptical whether more than just anonymous telemetry is gathered.
Firefox and Netscape superiority
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Internet years ago:
Site optimised for internet explorer 4.1, resolution 800x600
To view this website you need macromedia flash
This is the first thing I thought of as well. It’s never been “just use what you want”. It got better for a while as JavaScript and CSS normalized. Now it’s trash again.
Honestly, this was the reality. Half the shit couldn’t even be accessed without flash. Does nobody remember the flash on mobile drama?
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Now I want to play Robot Unicorn again.
Main issue with flash was that it potentially could have been used to circumvent the App store on the iPhone. Or at least from what I’ve heard.
ActiveX
Or Silverlight. None of these lockin attempts are new and they always failed. Might just take a while.
Companies don’t like being beholden to other companies.
800x600?! Thats way too much
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640x480@256 colors master race
pLeAsE uSe cHrOmE fOr tHe bEsT eXpErIeNcE
I’ve been using the internet since 1996. Newsgroups is about all that was good back then. Oh and email.
Chrome has become the new IE6 and Google the Microsoft of the internet.
Today is a bit of a low point, but I don’t think there was any perfect time.
Flash was a major issue during a lot of the “golden years” people are romanticizing. ActiveX was also, and still is, an issue for some parts of the world. Silverlight as well to a lesser extent
If there were any golden years, they probably were when the big three had similar market share between 2009 and 2014. But it was clear what was happening over those years, Chrome was eating IE and waning FF.
Yes apps are bad news.
What drives me mad is that 99.7% of the time you should be able to do everything through the browser without installing the 107th app. But they REALLY have to access your camera, microphone, files, location and body temperature in order to use the same shitty HTML wrapper just to show two input fields and some text.
Yep. Phone have gone horrible wrong and ended up in a duopoly. It is hard for new phone platform to get started. Hell, it’s a pain in the ass just have Android without Google services installed. It’s such anti-competitive and anti-privacy mess.
You speak correctly.
You are wise beyond your years. In respect I look at the late 90s as maybe my favorite period when the Internet was mostly run by (and used by) smart engineers and techies and not corrupted by misinformation and data mining. IRC was great at doing what discord does today. The web still had fun stuff and shareware was great to explore. Broadband was ramping up so speed was good for people who had it.
Thank you, but I’m getting on a bit now. I’d settle for my wiseness approaching my years!
I’m not sure I have favourite internet decade. Even today has it’s upsides. Probably more open code used running and accessing the internet now than ever. But we now have new problems!
I know smart people, who have used the internet to achieve a high technical skill set, who also believe some pretty crazy conspiracy stuff. Infectious miss-information is everywhere and no one is safe.
I think people romanticize Flash because of all the fun games you could play at Newgrounds, ArmorGames etc, that’s where nostalgia hits hard. It’s easy to forget the hoards of very shitty sites that didn’t need Flash at all, but were entirely made in it because fuck you. Adobe buying Macromedia definitely didn’t help with performance or security.
I heard it rumoured it was written in 32bit x86 and was a mess. That meant porting it to ARM was basically a rewrite. There are open source rewrites. But nothing would ever play everything the same. Flash was riddled with security flaws of both format and implication. Adobe joined im killing it became it was a risk to Adobe not at an asset. Despite it’s dominance at the time.
looks at IE6
Time is a flat circle
I was gonna post IE6. Internet technology was stagnated for a few years until Firefox lit a fire under everyone’s ass.
Firefox defeated the ie monopoly hope it does the same to the chormium monopoly
Mozilla is funded by Microsoft so they can point to it and say “we’re not a monopoly look at this other browser”. Literally the same reason apple exists. We aren’t getting an open market we’re getting bought and paid for fake competition.
I’m skeptical that a FF with a majority market share would continue to be as user-centric as it is now. Honestly I sort of hope that a third option comes out, but FF is my go to option for now.
I’ve lost faith in Google (nod to your username) for sure - in general I miss disruption, everyone used to believe they could do it better so no one shied away from the idea of building a better browser engine or any other technology for that matter.
Google stopped making decisions in the best interest of anyone other than their shareholders a long time ago.
I don’t really think the current setup is too bad. Chromium being open source means anyone can fork it and make their own better browser without having to write everything from scratch.
Personally, I use Vivaldi. To the best of my knowledge Google can’t spy on me, they have plans for mitigating Manifest V3, and it has many useful extra features such as tab splitting and separate workspaces. It’s made to be super customizable and from my experience the interface stays mostly the same between updates - something that annoyed me a lot about Chrome/Firefox. It can be a little rough around the edges sometimes, but I love using it.
“You must install Real Macromedia Java Player in order to view this video, then allow ActiveX controls.”
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Do not use their router. You are not required to. I have xfinity, and I use my own modem and my own router. No monthly rental fee. Just takes a little research before purchase.
Their gateway (basically a modem + router in one device) is to free to us because there’s a government subsidized program in my area that lets you get cheap internet and with that cheap internet plan also includes $0 per month equipment rental, so it’s free as long as we qualify for the subsidized plan.
Nobody in my household wants to spend extra money on a router that could impact speed and is redundant, since we already have one, and I certainly aint spending extra money on a router. Plus, it’s extra ewaste.
But yea I get your point, most people don’t have government subsidized internet like I do, so buying your own equipment is probably a better choice.
It saves me $10 per month, and that $120 per year is more than worth it. Plus, my home network is none of their business, and using your own equipment is your only means of privacy and control within your own network. I understand that not everyone cares, but consumers should be educated.
Out of curiosity how would you use your own modem and router? Do you have to connect it to the ISP’s gateway or is there another method?
You would connect your own modem to the incoming coaxial line and then connect a router / access point to the modem. There is no need for ISP owned equipment with a coaxial internet connection.
Also being bombarded with SIGN IN SIGN UP MAILING LIST COOKIES etc. Modern Internet sucks.
Not just the internet, consumer computing as a whole became a shitshow. You need accounts for everything, Microsoft pushes you hard to use their online service, the default becoming that you to log onto your own computer you need to go through their online Microsoft account, which is terribly unsafe (if your ms account gets hacked, the hacker had access to you system). After “software as a service” more or less has been normalised, I’m just waiting for hardware going down that path, too. I’d say it begins already that I had to create a NVIDIA account to actually update drivers. Soon, this account may not be free anymore.
To most issues like this there are workarounds, but sometimes you have to dig deep. So it’s either you need to spend time to make things work like you want, or accept all this crap. For me, this is fine, because I like the tinkering. But I am also *administrating" most of my elder family members’ computers, which is a nightmare because of that. “So I saved the document, where is it on my computer,?” - “If you used the default OneDrive crap, it just is not on your computer…”
This is the power of FOSS. By default it treats the end user with dignity because you aren’t a tool to extract value from anymore.
I bring a sort of UserAgent Switcher vibe to the party that Big Tech don’t really like.
Bro Microsoft gives me credit points (i opted out and they just forced it back down my throat a week later) for using edge. Little do they know im on firefox
Exactly, teams with Firefox can’t do a lot of things, but pretend to be edge and all of a sudden magically new features work now.
Apple’s shit fets me with this all the time
“any browser you like” back then, eh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.At least there was antitrust lawsuits, google has been getting off scot-free with chromium
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The EU is still fighting monopolies. The US needs to too, but it’s such a deeply unhealthy democracy now, it may be a while before it gets back to it.
I’m just going to say that, as someone who has dealt with technology for over 30 years, and has worked in, on, and with the internet for probably ~20 years, there has never been a time where every webpage ever, has worked in any one browser. IE6 was close, but that was mainly because it was either the only option, or at least the only one people knew about. There were still blowhard sites that only worked in Netscape navigator, or whatever… but the opposite was true as well, some things worked in IE that would refuse to function in Netscape/FF/opera.
Even during the supposed golden era of the past maybe ~3 years, just shortly prior to the app superiority complex of post 2020 internet, there were still sites that required IE. There were also sites that refused to function on IE… I’ve had issues getting very normal webpages to even load on any browser, but then I fire up Firefox and it works perfectly and instantly. Yet, FF has its own incompatibilities.
So the initial premise of the joke is, for all intents and purposes, invalid. There has never been a time that you could pick literally any browser, and have access to everything that’s on the internet… nevermind that being true for every browser.
It’s true that all mainstream sites worked in every browser, but that was always true… sites like that make a point of making themselves available regardless of what bad decisions you make over what browser to use. Those sites come to you, in that way (so to speak). Some sites demand you go to them, which is to say that you must operate their site in the way they want you to.
The app-ocalypse is just the latest in a long trend of getting you to meet them on their terms.
Let me introduce you to the mighty Ctrl+W.
Ctrl+W? Am I too much of a computer noob to understand?
Edit: Oh, just searched it, it closes a window? I don’t normally use shortcuts so I don’t know what most shortcuts are.
It’s a bit like alt f4
closes a tab
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The Ctrl+W salute!
I would gladly go back to 1990s Internet, if I could avoid all the ads, tracking and spam.
Good ol 90s internet, home to Bonzi Buddy, browser toolbars, and referral click to collect Windows toolbars
Dude just don’t use their router. All you need is the modem
Having your own router/access point can’t be stressed enough.
And, you don’t even need their modem. Sure it’s an additional outlay of cash, but buying your own modem gets you a nice upgrade and no worries about someone connecting to the Xfinity access point that’s bundled in their equipment.
And it pays for itself in less than a year
Plus the router usually comes with a subscription fee, whereas BYO router is a one-time payment. Ngl, some routers are expensive and if you can only afford the stock one they provide, I get it, but you’re definitely better off with your own.
Can’t always do that. At my last place I had att fiber with an all-in-one modem/router combo. You could not opt out and use your own modem. Best you can do is use the all in one as a pass through to your own router
Forgive my ignorance but how does it solve the issue mentioned? Do I need to flash my modem/router with certain software to block the pop ups to download the app?
I was referencing the text where OP mentioned they couldn’t change their WiFi password without the Xfinity app
That’s weird. What kind of router doesn’t have either web interface or ssh/telnet for configuration…?
Xfinity and Spectrum provided ones
The xfinity gateway (modem + router in one device)
10.0.0.1 is the web access to the controls and this is what it shows:
They link to a webpage to change those settings, which requires logging to xfinity account, but now this webpage just tells you you have to download the app.
Why would you continue to get pop ups?
I meant the pop ups on every website to download the app when on my phone
But they run unnecessary JavaScript Frameworks just for a page which redirects you to the download.
