Bonum Certa Men Certa

The 'Modern' Web

Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer

I Just Call It “Diarrhea Code” When I Encounter a Website That Won’t Work in SeaMonkey.



When you’re not nice to idiots who make “Modern” stuff, like “Diarrhea Code”, they pretty much just ban you from everything.



It’s “bad” to be opposed to bloated Web sites that stick out a sign saying you’re not welcome here because they’ve made a mess and it only works in Firefox and Chromium.



The reason I call code meant for Chromium “Diarrhea Code” is because it reminds me of what happens to a toilet bowl after you had too much Taco Bell and Mountain Dew. Stuff goes flying everywhere, it’s nasty, it makes the paint peel off the walls. It makes the buttons melt off your shirt. And you can’t wait to get rid of it.



20 years ago people began to push for what the Web is now. Binary blobs that run untrustworthy applications in your browser, too much JavaScript, HTML files that are several MB long and impossible to read that call out to this.



And they criticized people like me for writing clean, readable, markup, which was parsed, displayed, and presented to the user, over dial up modems, in a matter of seconds.



In 1999, you could right-click on my site and read the entire source code of the page. You didn’t have to take my word as to what was in there. I couldn’t have hidden much in there if I wanted to. HTML 3 and 4 were clean and readable by humans.



People said the situation where browsers would “forgive” slightly bogus tag use or the occasional typo (which I checked for) was “unacceptable” and now you have Microsoft Azure pumping in stuff that’s barely even code when you try to pay your electric bill with ComEd, and Chrome, Firefox, and Edge happily try to make sense of tens of megabytes of that.



Today in the GNOME room I was somewhat horrified to learn that you can make a Firefox .desktop that can handle mailto: with a Webmail “provider”.



I responded,



Webmail *barf*



They all have different interfaces. Piles of JavaScript, their spam filtering is not uniformly effective, and they almost always have ads and tracking scripts, or at least whitespace where the ads are supposed to go. Consider SeaMonkey Mail.



Now if you do load Outlook in Firefox, it tries to register itself to handle mailto: *rolls eyes* with a banner that pops up. Also, I have to lie to Google about my SeaMonkey UA with a pref to make it think I’m Thunderbird, even though the underlying Mail code IS FROM THUNDERBIRD.



Jamie Zawinski’s “Law of Software Envelopment” said that all programs expand until they can read email.



Giving mail so some garbage Web browser, which is made to run “Diarrhea Code” is only about the worst way you could expand something to read email.



Email belongs in a reader that supports POP3 and IMAP. Email should be text-only.



Sylpheed is a good Email program, but I doubt it could even handle GMail because of the entire OAuth debacle and needing to load a Web page to handle that, which sniffs to see if you’re “on the list” of allegedly secure “apps”, like Thunderbird, which just rewrote the entire GUI.



Someone already wrote why WASMs are terrible for security.



They have introduced an entire unique set of CVEs (listed in the monthly Mozilla patch updates, WASMs are roughly 10% of the attack footprint of the entire Firefox browser!) that will never stop, and they’re on by default in Tor Browser.



If you use a Web browser to handle your mail, eventually what they’re probably going to do is just rewrite the entire “Web” thing into a WASM blob which is so much worse than “Diarrhea Code”.



It won’t even be markup and scripts anymore. Just a binary program you can run it like it is, and none of your extensions (NoScript, ublock-origin, etc.) can act on the elements as they come in.



WASM is part of the Google trap to destroy the Open Web.



Widevine (Web DRM…I turn it off) and WASM are the warm up band for WEI.



And why wouldn’t you trust some skeevy porn or bittorrent site to send a WASM your way?



After all, Windows is a *very secure* operating system because you can just trust the operating system company that already has 95% of the total malware to make sure that WASMs can’t do any harm. 😛



And Mozilla can *obviously* make sure they stay in the “sandbox”. *LOL*



Even when they do stay in the browser sandbox, they can still do a lot of damage. They can spy on the user. They can mine crypto.



Crypto Miners that load in Web pages boasted that they were early adopters of WASM and they could use the victim’s phone or laptop to mine “Monero” at “70% of the speed of a native program”.



Turn it off.



Security Posers talking about “threat models” and “Secure Boot” in the firmware are just absolutely laughable in light of all of the new threats the same people, and the companies that handle them, stuff into everything.



This is worse than ActiveX and Internet Explorer. At least all you had to do to stay safe from that was find some other browser.



Now all Mozilla does is blind copy things from Google.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Writing and Coding Isn't Always Enough
Last year we had to assume a role we didn't have before: litigants
Autumn Has Come
Autumn should be exciting in all sorts of ways; it'll also mark our anniversary
IBM Has Taken Control of GNOME
Don't expect a successor to be found any time soon
 
Links 01/09/2025: Fresh Backlash Against Slop and "Norway’s Electricity Crisis is About to Hit Britain"
Links for the day
Links 01/09/2025: Catching Up (Mostly via Deutsche Welle), "Windows TCO" Effect in UK
Links for the day
Gemini Links 01/09/2025: Linguistic Barriers and "Web 1.0 Hosting"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 31, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, August 31, 2025
The UEFI 9/11 - Part IV - External Interference
They all seem to be playing a role in crushing Software Freedom and self-determination for users
Links 31/08/2025: Baggage Claim Scams, an Insurrectionist’s War on Culture, and a Sudden Robotics Hype
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/08/2025: Reviewing Netsurf and Slightly Less Historic Ada Design
Links for the day
Links 31/08/2025: Google Gmail Data Breach and LF Puff Pieces for Pay
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 30, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 30, 2025
This is What Google News Has Become
Moments ago
The Slopfarm WebProNews Has Turned Google News Into a Laughing Stock Full of Plagiarism by Slop
If Google News dies of neglect, that's one thing. It's starting to seem like active neglect by Google is a form of participation.
Do What is Moral, as What's Legal Isn't Always Moral
Do what's objectively moral, no matter the costs and the risks
Slopwatch: Google News Assisting Plagiarism and Anti-Linux FUD, Serial Slopper Rips Off Linux-Centric Journalists
This makes the Web a much worse place and lessens the incentive to do journalism
Links 30/08/2025: NVIDIA Fakes Results to Hide a Bubble Already in Implosion Phase, Data Breaches Galore, Important Win for Workers' Union in Canada
Links for the day
Representing and Speaking for Animals
If I ever choose to take this matter to tribunal with animals-centric NGOs on my side, it'll get some press coverage for sure
The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
In dictatorships, humour serves an important role. It's tragic.
In Kazakhstan, Yandex Estimated to be 20 Times Bigger Than Microsoft
Bing is measured as down this month
Shutterstock Not Enough? The Register MS Uses Slop Images in Articles (Seemingly More and More Over Time)
Cost-saving trajectory amid office shutdown?
Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Games, PostmarketOS, and Slop
Links for the day
Links 30/08/2025: Imgur Uproar and Many Ukraine Updates (Mediazona Reports Over 200,000 Russians Died for Putin)
Links for the day
How Not to Build Software
code forges that need a Web browser perhaps fill some 'niche' demand
GAFAM and "MATA"
The use of dark humour there hopefully helps illuminate what a lot of "modern" technology became like and how it interacts with human civilisation (to what ends and whose gain)
Birds Are Not "Pests and Vermin", Privacy is Not a Crime, and GNU/Linux is Not 'Hacking Platform'
I could not help but think of Free software analogies
The Sites Should Be Very Fast Again
That issue is now resolved
Flying in 2025
worse than ever before
Activists, Including Technical Activists, Need Not Pursue Affirmation
Techrights doesn't play or participate in a "popularity contest"
The UEFI 9/11 - Part III - Chaos is Scheduled to Happen Second Thursday of September (No Matter What the Microsofters Tell You)
The clock is ticking
Downplaying the Impact of "UEFI 9/11" is a Losing Strategy
we won't publish much whilst on holiday
Government Sites Should Run Free Software
Not proprietary bloatware with buzzwords
LLM Slopfarms Take No Breaks
When people run sites by bots they don't need to worry about "breaks"
GNOME Having a Meltdown Again
Thanks and farewell to Steven Deobald
Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Low Tech and Hunchbin 1.0.6
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 29, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, August 29, 2025