• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Speeding Up Web Access

G

Grandcheapskate

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 9, 2014
Messages
808
Location
New Jersey, USA
Are there tricks you can do with browsers to speed up web access?

As you have no doubt noticed, almost all websites seem to link out to many other sites, as well as execute lots of ActiveX stuff, as they build the page you really wanted to see. Probably a good topic for a rant, but this is more of a question.

While using Win XP and IE v8, I often put whatever websites I can into my "restricted sites" list as long as they continue to function. You would be amazed at the better response time you get when you stop websites from doing a bunch of unnecessary crap. If you set ActiveX to PROMPT in IE8, it's amazing how many times you get "prompted" for ActiveX activity just to display one page.

However, IE8 no longer works with many sites and therefore I often use the current version of Firefox (and WinXP). Firefox (for good or ill) does not give me the flexability to put websites into a resticted list, therefore I cannot stop all websites I visit from linking out to dozens of other sites. Watching the status bar at the bottom of the screen, I see dozens of sites are being accessed before I get the completed page I want. Many ad sites, Facebook, etc.

I have a couple forum sites I visit. I have these sites in my resticted list on IE8. When I test the response time for these sites using IE8 (resticted) and Firefox, the difference is staggering. The page displays almost immediatly using IE8 while Firefox takes a lot longer.

So are there any good browers which can run under WinXP, which give you the abilty to "choke off" all/some of those unnecessary links and activities? Are there tricks with Firefox to reduce both it's running size and response time?

Thanks...Joe
 
Old versions of Opera seem to work quite well--there's an online archive. There are also SlimBoat and QupZilla, which is Webkit-implemented rather than Chromium-based.

Firefox does have an add-on called "SiteBlock" which, with AdBlock Plus, can get rid of a lot of garbage.
 
Last edited:
Two that come to mind are a HOSTS file and a program call Disconnect that I use with Chrome -- I don't think it works with IE or Firefox -- it may be a chrome add-on.

The HOSTS file will block access to hundreds (maybe thousands) of BS and ad related sites so your browser doesn't waste resources (read time) downloading their crap. You can get one here.

Disconnect does something that blocks web sites from calling other sites (in the background, without your direct knowledge) and reporting to them about your browsing habits, etc.; it stops their ability to phone home and divulge any info about/from your browser.
 
IE8/earlier should NOT be faster than a modern version of Firefox -- not no way, no how... BUT

When you said "activeX" I was thinking "what the **** websites still use activeX?!?" -- then I remembered, Jscript, Microsofts similarly named functionally close to JavaScript engine with a different name thanks to legal issues, is treated as ActiveX -- so most likely what you've been blocking is scripting, NOT

... and blocking scripting can block a LOT of poorly crafted websites from even functioning; If you are freaking out about every little script like ones that go to Facebook, Google+, pInterest, Google Analytics you are crippling the functionality of the sites... more so if you are blocking common libraries like the stupid shiv/shim/polyfill/whateverTheDevilTheyreCallingThemThisWeek used to make things like CSS3 or HTML 5 appear to function in older browsers like modernizr, css3pie, etc, etc...

Really though, you can't tell me you haven't been told this at least a hundred dozen times the past decade: STOP USING IE!!! Particularly any version prior to IE9. It is an insecure buggy slow train wreck and thanks to your using it as your primary browser, your OS is most likely so completely screwed over with malware (AV or not) that it probably needs to be nuked from orbit with a clean OS install. (It's the only way to be sure). If you haven't been told that, have you been living under a rock? Only grandma who goes "I click on the big blue E" should be ignorant enough to even CONSIDER using a version of IE prior to 9 for ANYTHING - which means not running IE at ALL on WinXP/earlier. You might as well strip naked, paint a bullseye on your chest in glow in the dark paint, and run around the jungles of Vietnam in 1970 waving around a searchlight screaming "shoot me, shoot me" in Vietnamese for all the "security" and "safety" MSIE is providing you.

The suggestions mentioned so far are good -- As you've been using the backwards and crippled UI of IE you might be more comfortable with Chrome since Google's V8 scripting engine and blink ARE the fastest out there right now. If you're a paranoid tinfoil hat type in regards to google "watching you", get one of the Chromium builds.

You WILL want a decent adblock with that. I trust online advertisers about as far as I can throw the USS Iowa and would NEVER allow ads from pretty much anyone other than Google Adsense to load on my machine... and that's ONLY because Google actually seems to give a **** abou their reputation and slaps down anyone advertising through them who risks that.

Another thing to look into is called the "NoScript" extension for FF, or "ScriptBlock" for Chrome, which lets you block specific JavaScripts if so desired.

Choosing between Chrome and FF comes down to how much are you going to want to extend/modify the browser. If you can live with the pathetically crippled IE4 mac style interface and want more speed, go Chrome. If you want to drag an allegedly "modern" browser's UI to the bleeding edge of what Opera had three years ago before they pissed it all away with "Chrome with the big red O slapped on it", then FF is your only real choice.

... Though there is also Vivaldi. It wants to do what Opera didn't and make an actually MODERN UI for Chrome having all those things missing from the pathetic steaming pile of crippleware known as ChrOpera. (aka Opera 15/newer). It's got a long ways to go, but it's showing a good deal of promise already.

Sadly, a lot of sites right now are just pissing their own beds with endless pointless scripttardery for nothing, fat bloated slow idiotic "frameworks" like jQueery, BootCrap, Foundation, Blueprint, etc, etc... and vomit up markup any old way thanks to copy-pasta from systems written by people who have NO blasted business making websites in the first place. View source the default output from turdpress (wordpress) for proof enough of that. Gets worse that you start blocking things like JavaScripts and you often neuter the functionality as these ignorant mouth-breathing scripttards don't even TRY to write sites that "gracefully degrade" when you block scripting. Take facebook, scripting off it doesn't work...

Apparantly these dipshits never heard the unwritten rule of JavaScript, "If you can't make the page work without scripting FIRST, you likely have no business adding scripting to it!"

The end result is fat bloated steaming piles of manure sites that waste megabytes in several dozen files on doing the job of kilobytes in a single dozen files... and the more separate files used the slower the page load due to "handshaking" -- REGARDLESS of the connection speed. Ever transfer via FTP and notice that a single 1MB file will transfer in a fraction the time a thousand 1K files will? Yeah, that's handshaking in action. That's why when people use a half dozen separate CSS files with no MEDIA attributs on the LINK tag, I call them a halfwit dumbass who has no business making websites. That's why when people use 20+ separate JavaScripts on a page, I say they need a good swift kick in the crotch... and why the people sleazing out websites any-old-way using things like Bootstrap and jQuery need to be dragged around back o' the woodshed and put down like Old Yeller.

Bottom line -- It is VERY unlikely you were blocking ACTUAL ActiveX -- anyone still using that on websites is a moron since true ActiveX doesn't work on the majority of browsers in circulation right now (basically anything that isn't IE). You are likely blocking JavaScripts, and that could in fact be a hefty part of why so many pages aren't working for you! That you've been using IE also means dimes to dollars your OS install is completely buggerred -- running Spybot Search and Destroy and MalwareBytes on it could be an... interesting experience. Running IE8/earlier in terms of malware is like sending yourself to prison because you WANT to drop the soap. ANYONE telling you otherwise doesn't know enough on the subject to be flapping their gums about it.
 
Grandcheapskate said:
Watching the status bar at the bottom of the screen, I see dozens of sites are being accessed before I get the completed page I want.

I have a couple forum sites I visit. I have these sites in my resticted list on IE8. When I test the response time for these sites using IE8 (resticted) and Firefox, the difference is staggering. The page displays almost immediatly using IE8 while Firefox takes a lot longer.

.....

So are there any good browers which can run under WinXP, which give you the abilty to "choke off" all/some of those unnecessary links and activities?
Click to expand...
At the risk of creating an echo in here... Chrome with its Disconnect add-on does *exactly* that. :)
 
deathshadow said:
Sadly, a lot of sites right now are just pissing their own beds with endless pointless scripttardery for nothing, fat bloated slow idiotic "frameworks" like jQueery, BootCrap, Foundation, Blueprint, etc, etc... and vomit up markup any old way thanks to copy-pasta from systems written by people who have NO blasted business making websites in the first place. View source the default output from turdpress (wordpress) for proof enough of that. Gets worse that you start blocking things like JavaScripts and you often neuter the functionality as these ignorant mouth-breathing scripttards don't even TRY to write sites that "gracefully degrade" when you block scripting. Take facebook, scripting off it doesn't work...

Apparantly these dipshits never heard the unwritten rule of JavaScript, "If you can't make the page work without scripting FIRST, you likely have no business adding scripting to it!"

The end result is fat bloated steaming piles of manure sites that waste megabytes in several dozen files on doing the job of kilobytes in a single dozen files... and the more separate files used the slower the page load due to "handshaking" -- REGARDLESS of the connection speed. Ever transfer via FTP and notice that a single 1MB file will transfer in a fraction the time a thousand 1K files will? Yeah, that's handshaking in action. That's why when people use a half dozen separate CSS files with no MEDIA attributs on the LINK tag, I call them a halfwit dumbass who has no business making websites. That's why when people use 20+ separate JavaScripts on a page, I say they need a good swift kick in the crotch... and why the people sleazing out websites any-old-way using things like Bootstrap and jQuery need to be dragged around back o' the woodshed and put down like Old Yeller.
Click to expand...

I just HAVE to second this :)

Even on a faster computer, there are many web sites that load so slowly you can get up, take a dump, come back, and it is still loading. I have no idea how less powerful mobile/laptop users put up with this crap.

And more web sites are loading content via scripting rather than HTML (such as Youtube comments), which has the effect of making the site even more dependent on the browser version. Unlike HTML, which theoretically should at least TRY to render even back to Mosaic 1, if there is anything unrecognized or erroneous in a script, it will usually just stop. And if you turn off scrapting, well no content for you!
 
I websurf on an older dual-core laptop every night, and the #1 thing that has increased my speed, and quite dramatically at that, was installing uBlock. As someone who tried a few times in the last 15 years to make money off of the web, I have thus far resisted running an ad blocker on moral grounds... but the current state of the web is to try to squeeze blood from the advertising stone, and some pages will try to fire off double-digit scripts, video ads, etc. There were certain sites that ground the browser to a halt. Didn't matter which browser.

Initially I felt bad about doing this, but websites take the same risk that broadcast television companies do -- there are always people who will fast-forward (or skip entirely) through commercials, and installing an ad-blocker is no different. Skipping commercials isn't illegal, and blocking website ads isn't illegal either. (Unfortunately, the courts have had mixed results on the blocking/skipping mechanisms; for example, the wonderful ReplayTV DVR was bankrupted trying to defend itself, whereas commercial-skipping mechanisms remain in Windows Media Center and other software.)

Why uBlock over AdBlock? uBlock uses less resources and has a smaller memory footprint.
 
Apparantly these dipshits never heard the unwritten rule of JavaScript, "If you can't make the page work without scripting FIRST, you likely have no business adding scripting to it!"
Click to expand...
Just because this is a vintage computing forum is no reason to keep the useage of the internet stuck in the dark ages. Scripting is a necessity for modern responsive websites.
 
Another thing that's helped my web browsing speed is enabling HTML5 for videos where possible. Adobe Flash is a big creaking pile of garbage. Of course this means that you have to have an HTML5-capable browser...

Along the same line as NoScript, Ghostery keeps the social networking sites out of your web pages.
 
deathshadow said:
That you've been using IE also means dimes to dollars your OS install is completely buggerred -- running Spybot Search and Destroy and MalwareBytes on it could be an... interesting experience.
Click to expand...

I took the challenge and just installled Spybot. The total system scan showed nothing higher than a level 2, almost all of which were easiliy identifiable (such as visited site lists). One caveat...I reinstalled my OS about 3 weeks ago.

I often test sites to see if they work by turning almost everything off. Every forum I visit can operate without scripting - I may lose a little functionality (such as being automatically redirected), but that is a small price to pay for the dramtic decrease in response time.

As I stated in the opening post, this could easily turn into a rant session on the lack of programming competance. I noticed the same thing 20-30 years ago on the mainframe when the pool of talent should have been far more selective. But unfortunately we have to deal with the internet as it is, and that means trying to find a way to disable as much unnecessary crap as possible.

One of the reasons I left my mainframe life behind is I got tired of being forced to learn to do the same thing a different way. Lots of learning and discarding of knowledge. The internet is now like that, only with technology and resources. In order to do the same thing you did years ago, you need far more powerful machines and far more resources. The end goal is the same - the path to get there is far more complex and paved with danger

Joe
 
Spybot isn't going to speed up your web access; it's the websites themselves that create the slowdown, not something running on your local system. Try uBlock.

Today's programming paradigm is flexibility over speed, because modern hardware is so fast that you rarely need to optimize for speed unless you have a specialized application (trading, games, statistics, analysis, etc.). Today's audience expects vastly different tech to "just work" when combined, so flexibility is the optimization target.
 
Doug G said:
Just because this is a vintage computing forum is no reason to keep the useage of the internet stuck in the dark ages. Scripting is a necessity for modern responsive websites.
Click to expand...
BULL!

If you mean responsive layout, then no... that's CSS3's job... if you mean elements people can interact with, that's CSS2 and 3's job. Anything else? Bloated slow BS that either has no damned business on a website in the first place, or could be done more efficiently WITHOUT the scripting.

... and I'm NOT saying don't use JavaScript, but if your basic functionality is built entirely upon requiring it you are alienating a significant part of your potential audience -- like say every single person who uses noScript/scriptblock/codeBlock or other "selective" script blockers.

Making it work without scripting FIRST and then enhancing that functionality with scripting is just part of progressive enhancement -- somethign that EVERY good developers should be doing so that the page also "gracefully degrades" -- which is to say as fancy bits of "gee ain't it neat" stuff is missing/unavailable/irrelevant -- like scripting, CSS, or even images -- the page is still useful to the visitor. This is the Internet, the only thing you can guarantee about who will visit a website is you cannot guarantee who will visit a website.

... and there's far more to visiting user-agents than scripting aware, scripting capable screen media targets. Search engines don't have eyeballs... screen readers, braille readers, users with script blockers, image blockers (due to things like metered bandwidth), legacy browsers. That's what semantic markup, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation are there to address. Good scripting should ENHANCE functionality, not supplant it.

But sure, go ahead and crap together megabytes of framework based scripttardery into bloated slow painful to use websites that arent' as functional as what we had a decade and a half ago, and that are less useful to site visitors and slower on todays multi-ghz multi-core broadband enabled systems than the same types of sites were back in the 486 dialup days. Who cares how many visitors bounce to some other website that does work right...

It's all "gee ain't it neat" BS that's more flash than substance, and in many cases amounts to nothing more than dumping a can of shellac on a pile. No matter how much you buff it the result is still bug excrement on horse manure.

CONTENT people, CONTENT. Marked up semantically, and delivered in as device neutral gracefully degrading and accessible manner as possible.

Between the scripttards and their bloated pointless idiotic halfwit garbage, PSD jockeys with the giant set of brass to call themselves "designers" when they don't know enough about HTML, CSS, accessibility or emissive colourspace to be deisgning jack **** for anybody, and the mouth-breathing morons who sleaze together off the shelf frameworks as if it will magically make them anything more than nube-predating scam artists -- my disgust with the state of the industry as a whole has blossomed from disgust to the point of nausea into full-on projectile vomiting Linda Blair style. mmm... pea soup.

99%+ of the claims made to defend such dumbass practices amount to little more than lame excuses -- this article:
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200704/lame_excuses_for_not_being_a_web_professional/

... being as relevant today as it was eight years ago! Probably more so with every halfwit on the planet sleazing together turdpress, bootcrap and jqueery then going to web development forums asking "why is my site slow", "why are people complaining they can't use it" and "what's wrong with my site?"

Gee, you'd think they were averaging 2 megabytes in a hundred files to deliver 1.2k of plaintext and a dozen content images... typically half that being scripttardery that pisses away accessibility, pisses away speed, pisses away battery life on mobile, and again either does crap that has NO damned business on a website in the first place, or is CSS' job!

Again, if you know the first blasted thing about using HTML and CSS properly, view source your average site sleazed together with turdpress for proof enough of that... since as I often say, if you don't know what's wrong with this:

Code: 
<style type="text/css">.recentcomments a{display:inline !important;padding:0 !important;margin:0 !important;}</style>
<style type="text/css" id="custom-background-css">
body.custom-background { background-image: url('https://wp-themes.com/wp-content/themes/fkidd/images/background.png'); background-repeat: repeat; background-position: top left; background-attachment: scroll; }
</style>
	</head>
	<body class="home blog custom-background">
		<div id="body-content-wrapper-full">
			
			<header id="header-main">
				<div id="header-top">
					<div id="header-top-content-wrapper">
							<a href="https://wp-themes.com/" title="Theme Preview" class="homepage-icon-link"></a>
<ul class="header-social-widget"

or this:

Code: 
<div id="container">
		<div id="wrap"> 
			<div class="main">
				<div class="main-content sizing">
					<header role="banner">
						<div class="site-name half left">
							<div class="site-title">
								<h1 id="site-title" ><a href="https://wp-themes.com" title="Theme Preview" rel="home">Theme Preview</a></h1>
								<h2 id="site-description">Previewing Another WordPress Blog</h2>
							</div>
						</div><!-- .site-name .half .left -->
					</header><!-- header -->
					<nav class="menu">
												<div class="skip-link screen-reader-text">

or this:

Code: 
<div id="header-content-wrapper">
					<div id="header-logo">
						<a href="https://wp-themes.com/" title="Theme Preview"><img src='https://wp-themes.com/wp-content/themes/fcorpo/images/logo.png' alt='Theme Preview' title='Theme Preview' /></a>					</div>
					<nav id="navmain">
						<div class="menu"><ul><li class="page_item page-item-2"><a href="https://wp-themes.com/?page_id=2">About</a></li><li class="page_item page-item-46 page_item_has_children"><a href="https://wp-themes.com/?page_id=46">Parent Page</a><ul class='children'><li class="page_item page-item-49"><a href="https://wp-themes.com/?page_id=49">Sub-page</a></li></ul></li></ul></div>
					</nav>
					
					<div class="clear">
					</div>
				</div>

Do the world a favor, back the **** away from the keyboard, and take up something a bit less detail oriented like macrame as anyone who allows code like that on a site has NO business writing websites in the first place!

The absolute rubbish vomited up and called websites right now makes the idiotic BS crapped out in Nyetscape Composer or Frontpage look good. It's like the more tools we're given to do things properly, the bigger a mess people are making of it.
 
Last edited:
Trixter said:
I websurf on an older dual-core laptop every night, and the #1 thing that has increased my speed, and quite dramatically at that, was installing uBlock. As someone who tried a few times in the last 15 years to make money off of the web, I have thus far resisted running an ad blocker on moral grounds...
Click to expand...
Funny, moral grounds is why I run one... as it is I would NEVER put advertisements on websites in the first place; I recently TRIED doing so, and after six months am ready to pull said adverts as pointless bloat that just makes the site painful to use -- and that was the REPUTABLE one; adsense.

Online advertisers are sleazy scumbags leeching off the teat of site owners DUMB ENOUGH to believe the "advertising can pay for everything" LIE! It has LESS business legitimacy than Amway or Mary Kay, and that hasn't changed since the first advertisements started cropping up in the 1990's. The laugh being it was one of the major contributors to the original dotcom bubble burst, but now operates without liquidity so when things do go tits-up face-down it's going to be an even bigger fall.

... which after six years of my saying this Mark Cuban comes out and says the same thing!

... as do other people who might have a clue when it comes to financial bubbles like Peter Schiff. (Schiff's treated as an annoying crackpot, but what makes him most annoying is the track record of being RIGHT)
 
Chuck(G) said:
Another thing that's helped my web browsing speed is enabling HTML5 for videos where possible. Adobe Flash is a big creaking pile of garbage.
Click to expand...
Every time people say that my BS alarm gets triggered... HTML 5 is buggy, slow, and when it fails it takes down the whole browser, not just the plugin. (assuming you are using FF or Chrome that bother sandboxing plugins now). It's more decade old myth than fact, and usually the province of the sour grapes from Appletards that Quicktime lost the media formats war, or the FLOSStard BS about how wonderful Ogg Vorbis is. (It isn't).

The real laugh being the "rah rah, fight the man" types have been sold on HTML 5 VIDEO (pointless redundant tag BTW undoing the progress of 4 STRICT) as being fighting vendor lock in (flash) when it in fact creates vendor lock in -- in the form of our being at the whims and mercy of whatever it is the browser makers happen to feel like implementing, to the exclusion of all others.

Which if memory serves, isn't that what killed the VASTLY superior JPEG2000 image format?

HTML 5 typically lacks codec acceleration, render acceleration... It's like comparing VLC to Media Player Classic on windows. VLC is so CPU reliant you need a 3ghz P4D / A64 4000+ / Core 2 duo to even THINK about 1080p playback, something MPC and the native codec support can handle on as little as a ION equipped Atom. HTML 5 video is similarly flawed which combined with the initial lack of DRM and painfully pitiful attempts at adding it (and lack of browser support for it) is why services like Hulu, Netflix and WWE Network wouldn't touch HTML 5 VIDEO with a 80 foot cattle prod except when they HAVE to to even have support... and in many cases content providers are basically saying "**** Apple" on that one!

Did we also mention that like most of the HTML 5 idiocy it also re-introduces redundancies HTML 4 STRICT was trying to get rid of, and that HTML 5 is the province of the halfwits and fools who until recently were sleazing out HTML 3.2 and proprietary tags and slapping 4 Tranny on it -- now they just slap 5 Lip-service at the start of the same outdated, outmoded broken "I cans haz intarnets" code?
 
Trixter said:
Spybot isn't going to speed up your web access; it's the websites themselves that create the slowdown, not something running on your local system. Try uBlock.

Today's programming paradigm is flexibility over speed, because modern hardware is so fast that you rarely need to optimize for speed unless you have a specialized application (trading, games, statistics, analysis, etc.). Today's audience expects vastly different tech to "just work" when combined, so flexibility is the optimization target.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I knew Spybot would not help with access speed, but I figured let me try it and see what I found.

I saw the programming motto of "fast development over code efficiency" back in my mainframe days. As machine power started to increase dramatically, efficient code was no longer viewed as necessary. I saw this first hand in the battle between network and relational databases.

The network model was very efficient but required lots of up front database design before programming could start. Changes in design usually required restructing of the existing data - which meant downtime. The relational model let programming begin early with the database design growing to meet new code. Changes in database design could be done without wholesale restructuring. In order to mask the inefficiency of programming first and then "designing on the fly", IBM kept throwing more and more hardware resources at the mainframe to allow their relational database to keep up with network databases which, when well designed, could run faster with FAR less resources.

Getting back to the internet, as I have stated before, I am very pessimistic about where we are, and where we will be in the future. This goes not just for the internet, but PC software as well. I do not see the future as bright, but rather as getting far more complex and convoluted. And maybe worst of all, there will continue to be a degrading of quality control which will lead to dangerous complications.

I truly fear for the security of data.

Joe
 
Last edited:
deathshadow said:
Every time people say that my BS alarm gets triggered... HTML 5 is buggy, slow, and when it fails it takes down the whole browser, not just the plugin. (assuming you are using FF or Chrome that bother sandboxing plugins now). It's more decade old myth than fact, and usually the province of the sour grapes from Appletards that Quicktime lost the media formats war, or the FLOSStard BS about how wonderful Ogg Vorbis is. (It isn't).
Click to expand...

Don't get too worked up. I run Ubuntu Linux with Firefox. Adobe hasn't brought out a general Linux-compatble plugin update for a very long time. I experience frequent crashes when using the currently available one. If I enable HTML5, the crashes go away and I can browse in peace--and my videos play faster. I know that Chrome has better flash integration, but I do depend on a few extensions to FF to make my slow connect speed tolerable. If you know of a better FF plugin, I'm all ears.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I run Ubuntu Linux with Firefox. Adobe hasn't brought out a general Linux-compatble plugin update for a very long time.
Click to expand...
Actually that's just ANOTHER reason I consider linsux to be a rinky pathetically crippled tinkertoy as far as using it as a desktop OS is concerned. Great for servers... but between the unstable hardware API that changes every time a stiff breeze flies up Linus pants, and relative lack of interest of continued support by desktop application vendors it's definately a far third so far as desktop OS choices go.

Though 99% of that is X11 implementations with their client-server BS. Wayland is a step the right direction, but with hardware vendors giving little more than lip service and empty promises mainstream desktop Linux distros will continue to be a poor choice.

YMMV, but blaming a crappy desktop environments shortcomings on one vendor not giving a flying **** about that environment is... well... special.

I do however know a great plugin that will give your copy of FF a pretty solid reliable copy of Flash at least for normal MP4 type video playback. It's called "windows".
 
vwestlife said:
My web site still loads quickly and renders properly on a 486 with 16 MB of RAM running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Internet Explorer 5.01. :D
Click to expand...
Funny guy, that could be because it's the bleeding edge of 1997 coding practices; shame it's useless on screen readers and search engines probably give it the bird... It's actually funny, it's the WORST of the HTML 3.2 pre 4 era "how not to build a page" - but hey, it works and is SMALLER than most of the poorly coded "i can haz intarnets" garbage people vomit up today.

... and the colours -- ooh the colours. WCAG, what's that?!? :p

Would be fun to modernize that, but to do so properly actually obeying the rules of HTML and CSS. Don't know how well that would fly in IE 5.01, but 5.5 would be a reasonable prospect. Of course if you used semantic markup and disabled CSS in IE 5, it WOULD be functional, though a bit plain looking. Would be interesting with something so simple to see if semantic markup, CSS and separation of presentation from content does actually provide for a smaller codebase. It probably WOULD index better and use less bandwidth even if it were more code due to leveraging caching models.

After all, that was SUPPOSED to be the intent of CSS and graceful degradation; properly written pages should be able to work as if CSS and presentational tags like FONT and CENTER never existed. After all, search engines, screen readers and braille readers don't have eyeballs.
 
deathshadow said:
Actually that's just ANOTHER reason I consider linsux to be a rinky pathetically crippled tinkertoy as far as using it as a desktop OS is concerned.
Click to expand...

You hate Linux--got it. As if Win8 or Vista was any great shakes. I take it that you don't run many EDA tools and that you've never had a problem with malware. And I do keep a copy of XP on a VirtualBox session.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top