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

Coming Soon: Microsoft Fake Results, Mass Layoffs, and Silence About All the People Microsoft Pressured to "Quit" (So That They Don't Get Counted as Layoffs)
there will be more mass layoffs
Speed of GNU/Linux
The media seldom speaks of the dangers of "proprietary software"
Proprietary Windows Versus "Linux" News (Trying to Keep People on Windows, Never Exploring GNU/Linux)
Good editors know better how to recognise threats and not give them lip service
Ensuring That Every Computer User Anywhere in the World Can Take Control of All His or Her Computers
We must fight the people who attack general-purpose computing, in particular those who push this agenda very aggressively inside Linux
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: Autism and Structural Navigation
Links for the day
What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
OSI has gone "full Microsoft"
 
China is Already Culling GAFAM (Not Just Microsoft Windows)
OS monoculture or "OS hegemony" may be coming to an end
The "Telephone Operating System in the Vatican" is 95 Years Old, Vatican Moved to GNU/Linux
Maybe Microsoft is down to zero already
If Tesla Shares (and Alleged Value) Fell 55% (From $489 to $222) in a Few Months Maybe It's Not Worth Anything At All (It's Just Gambling)
Tesla swasticars have turned from a "status symbol" into a "public embarrassment" and cause for casual humiliation
Chromebooks' Adoption in Sweden No Longer Depends on Schools
School breaks are when classrooms are shut
No, IBM is Not Investing $150 Billion in the US and It Doesn't Even Have That Kind of Money
Here we go again... media as a vehicle of lobbying and misinformation
Leak: The EPO's General Consultative Committee (GCC) Does Not Consult Staff on Crucial Matters and Bypasses the Administrative Council (AC) to Do Illegal Things
violations against the EPO's very staff
New Leaks Coming Soon, We Maintain 100% Record of Successful Resistance to Censorship
We won't be told what we can and cannot say (especially when it's true)
Central African Republic (CAR): Vista 11 is Only ~0.2% Market Share
99.8% to go!
BSD and GNU/Linux Replaced Microsoft in Secure Servers, All Microsoft Has Left is LLM Slop for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)
the FUD machine never rests
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: A Simple Task Tracking and Auto-Prioritization Tool and Other Programs
Links for the day
Links 28/04/2025: Canada's Election, Pakistan-India Conflict
Links for the day
Glue Inside Your Pizza (or Why People Will Get Fed Up With Slop)
People are given "answers" from non-intelligence word dumpsters
Links 28/04/2025: Cyberattacks Happening, Chatbots Disappointing, and "Free Speech Under Fire"
Links for the day
Phone Adoption Very Low in Vatican, Windows Usage Fell Nonetheless
Even in places where people still use desktops/laptops most of the time (and have access to these) Windows is gradually losing ground
GNU/Linux 9% in Cuba, Vista 11 Waning, Android Dominant
Microsoft has pretty much lost Cuba
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 27, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, April 27, 2025
In 24 Countries Observed by statCounter Vista 11 is Still Less Than a Quarter of Windows Users Despite All Other Versions Being 'Expired'
They ought to move to GNU/Linux
Links 27/04/2025: Pope Goodbyes, "Politics of Fear", Slop Redux and More Google Shutdowns (Google Debt Had Grown This Year)
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Serenity Dialectics, Hockey Jersey Ethics, and More
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025