Now, I have a pretty fast CPU—a 4790K—and it wasn't that long ago that most computers had less than 200 MB of RAM total. And, you could read on those computers just fine.
On the other hand, if I repeat the same test with my Slack tab, I get 30% of CPU and 400 MB of RAM. Slack doesn't have ads, and IM clients are another thing that worked just fine 20 years ago.
I guess my point is, the web is bloated, and I'm not sure why we're harping on The Times.
NYT should be a relatively simple website. Sure, they have some very nice interactive stories and we'll give those a pass, but even just plain text articles load an amazing amount of cruft. It's text, just send the damn text.
Everyone else being bloated isn't an excuse.
> Everyone else being bloated isn't an excuse.
It's not, but I'd rather focus on the worst offenders instead of the half-decent ones. I didn't compare it to Slack because I thought Slack was a good example—I did it for the exact opposite reason.
And, as long as there are sites that are so much heavier and yet seem to be doing fine (I don't like it, but it is what it is), I doubt NY Times is removing 3rd-party ads due to performance issues. It could be a nice side effect, though.
Render time for my (aging) macbook pro is within the acceptable threshold (< 1500ms), memory snapshot in firefox is ~90Mb, and it feels like it loads quickly and responsively. It could be better - but it's infinitely more usable than NYT for me.
Does this resource need to be generated dynamically?
Related: can this resource be cached?
More important: can this resource be resized?
Often overlooked: do I need to process this javascript to provide the equivalent UX?
The modern Web is terrible, and the modern state of app dev is terrible due to a substantial subset of the reasons that the modern Web is terrible.
It was a contender?
> NYT should be a relatively simple website.
There's editors from the NYT lurking here who will strongly disagree.
And sure, obviously NYT is more complex than throwing textfiles at users.. but do you really need to be running A/B tests for acquisition and have such a complicated pipeline to buying a subscription? Do you need dozens of analytics suites? Data is useful, but only to an upper bound of what you can meaningfully analyze.
So, I have some empathy for the NYT staff as individual contributors, but as an org, it's time to evolve.
They only send what the user requests.
Using a software program that makes automatic requests that you are not easily in control of, e.g., a popular web browser, might give the impression that they control what is sent.
They do not control what is sent. The user does.^1
The user makes a request and they send a response.
One of the requests a fully-automatic web browser makes to NYT is to static01.nyt.com
Personally, as a user who prefers text-only, this is the only request I need to make. As such I don't really need a heavily marketed, fully-automatic, graphical, ad-blocking web browser to make a single request for some text.^2
#! /bin/sh
case $1 in
world |w*) x=world # shortcut: w
;;us |u*) x=us # shortcut: u
;;politics |p*) x=politics # shortcut: p
;;nyregion |n*) x=nyregion # shortcut: n
;;business |bu*) x=business # shortcut: bu
;;opinion |o*) x=opinion # shortcut: o
;;technology |te*) x=technology # shortcut: te
;;science |sc*) x=science # shortcut: sc
;;health |h*) x=health # shortcut: h
;;sports |sp*) x=sports # shortcut: sp
;;arts |a*) x=arts # shortcut: a
;;books |bo*) x=books # shortcut: bo
;;style |st*) x=style # shortcut: st
;;food |f*) x=food # shortcut: f
;;travel |tr*) x=travel # shortcut: tr
;;magazine |m*) x=magazine # shortcut: m
;;t-magazine |t-*) x=t-magazine # shortcut: t-
;;realestate |r*) x=realestate # shortcut: r
;;*)
echo usage: $0 section
exec sed -n '/x=/!d;s/.*x=//;/sed/!p' $0
esac
curl -s https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$x/index.jsonp
Example: Make simple page of titles, article urls and captions, where above script is named "nyt".
nyt tr | sed '/\"headline\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/\".*/<\/p>/;p};/\"full\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/..$/<\/p>/;p};/\"link\": \"/{s///;s/ *//;s/\".*//;s|.*|<a href=&>&</a>|;p}' > travel.html
firefox ./travel.html
The truth is that they are just sending the damn text. However you are voluntarily choosing to use a software program that is automatically making requests for things other than the text of the article, i.e., "cruft".
1. The Google-sponsored HTTP/[23] protocol is seeking to change this dynamic, so if websites sending stuff to you without you requesting it first bothers you, you might want to think about how online advertisers and the companies that enable them might use these new protocols.
2. However I might use one for for viewing images, watching video, reading PDFs, etc., offline. Web browsers are useful programs for consuming media. It is in the simple task of making HTTP requests that their utility has diminished over time. The user is not really in control.
I go to a restaurant and I can't just walk into the kitchen and grab a plate of food. Nor can I walk into the refrigerator, grab some supplied, and then walk over to the stations and start cooking. Instead I have wait to be seated, order indirectly via a waiter, wait for the chef and staff to prepare more order, etc...
It seems to me visiting a website is similar. The user choose to visit the site. That includes the 3rd parties and less controls. Just like I don't get to pick what sources the restaurant used for their food, nor do I have any say in their hiring or management practices. Nor do I have any choice in the music they play or the TVs they have on (bar like restaurants often have TVs). If I don't like their choices my choice is to be or not be a customer. I don't get to hack around that, walking in the back door and taking the food.
I know the analogy isn't perfect. It's my computer and I have no obligation to let them use it as they please vs as I please. But still, there's some middle ground IMO between the 2 extremes.
IMO the reason is quite easy to put the finger on:
It's because it is framing the problem squarely as one of the user, culminating in the phrase that one is "voluntarily choosing".
If you don't want to do research and customize scripts for every friggin' domain/website (and having to do it again when the site structure changes), there is no "voluntary choice".
If you don't want to accept that this "solution" has to forgo a lot of essential characteristics of hypermedia, there is no "voluntary choice".
If you're not technically versed in these things, there never was a "voluntary choice" to begin with.
In general, if you want to use the World Wide Web remotely as it is intended, there is no "voluntary choice".
I think you're unclear in your mind about the relationship between you and the website you visit.
To use your restaurant analogy, browsing the web is more like ordering delivery. You send a request for food from the menu and money to cover it, and a while later, a driver with a bag arrives at your doorstep. That bag contains the food you order, some packaging, often plastic cutlery, and some advertising. The transaction between you and the restaurant involved exchanging money for food, and the restaurant doesn't get to have any further say about what you do with that food. You're free to throw away the box, the cultery and the advertising leaflets into the bin, and give half of the food to your cat. They cannot, technically or ethically, make you eat the food out of the box it came from, while reading the advertising leaflets.
It's like that with web browsers. You ask for content (via HTTP), you get a response that includes links to other things you're invited to request. You're free to cut the response up and render it the way you like, you're free to request or not request the other linked resources. That was how the web was designed to work, that's how HTTP protocol is meant to be used. Now plenty of websites will try to insist they're more like dining in than delivery, but that's just them trying to guilt-trip you into making them more money. It's not something they're entitled to.
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/netw...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Network_Monit...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/devtools-gui...
The web's first browser, working in line mode, could probably request the text, and only the text, of an article from nytimes.com. It has no capability to automatically follow links to ads and trackers.
nyt tr |sed 's/ *//;/</!d'|uniq > travel.html
An interesting point of discussion might be the amount of third party cruft on the template article page versus the more dynamic front page. When Javascript is disabled, on each article page all images display and there are no ads. Downloading any video in the page is as simple as
curl -O `grep -o https://[^\"]*mp4 article.html`I don't think you're aware of how much time as passed since 200 MB of RAM was the norm. Even in 2005, lower end Dell laptops ($639) had 256 MB of RAM as the minimum [0]. The 2002 PowerBook G4's base model had 256 MB [1].
[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20050309050556/http://www1.us.del...
> And, you could read on those computers just fine.
The problem is not that the New York Times website is using too much memory for the average system. The problem is that it is using several orders of magnitude more memory to run ad-related JS in the background than it needs for the user-desired functionalitty.
It isn't the user's responsibility to provide a better solution. Not having a solution doesn't make the problem disappear.
At first, I couldn't get it to boot—it kept kernel panicking, and I couldn't figure out why. After a bit of Googling, I found the problem—I'd given the VM too much memory. Rhapsody DP2 will not boot if it has access to more than 192 MB of RAM. I assume Apple figured that no one would ever need that much.
Rhapsody came out in 1998. Not really that long ago.
The Apple II came out in 1977, 43 years ago.
1998 therefore roughly marks the halfway point between the dawn of mainstream personal computers and the present day. I dare say 1998 was a very long time ago, in PC years.
"There was a time—recent enough that it was within most of our lifetimes—when most computers had less than 200 MB of RAM total. You could read on those computers just fine."
Most ofthe gnu utils still work perfectly fine many of them were written in late 70’s and 80’s , apple itself ships , in the latest OSX , posix utilities from late 80’s versions for GPL reasons.
Perhaps it is not fair comparison , utilities are not the same as an OS . unix or Linux from the same era may not work anymore as well.
In addition to being an entire OS as you mentioned, Rhapsody was a "developer preview". The final version was called "Mac OS X Server 1.0". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0
Rhapsody was more of a quick and dirty port of NeXTSTEP to Mac hardware than a version of OS X.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
>Rhapsody came out in 1998.
NeXTSTEP is from the late 80's.
The version he tested was from 1998. Similar to how Windows NT came out in 1993, but the current version (Windows 10) has a few added capabilities since.
MacOS addressed up to 96 Gigs of RAM initially, now up to 128 Gigs of RAM.
Because '10% of a core and 200 MB of ram' just to read a few headlines is obscene, and slack being even worse doesn't make the NYT's bloat less obscene.
With my uBO/uMatrix settings, about:performance in firefox reports that the nytimes.com homepage takes 7.9 MB of ram (and immeasurably little CPU time, because I disabled javascript.) https://lite.cnn.com/en/ is better insofar as it takes 2.6 MB of ram.
Half-Life 2 lists 512mb ram as required. It came out in 2004.
Also, Half Life 2 was a state-of-the-art video game for an audience that largely had fancy gaming PCs.
They likely couldn't run Slack or the NYT tho. Just think about how slow the PS4 store loads (it's html5) or the whole xbone ui.
Games are actually optimized for speed. NYT is optimized on a different key performance indicator.
I just built a 12 core system I would describe as "pretty fast." A high end consumer desktop these days is 16 cores. A couple years from now, that will be considered "pretty fast."
Make no mistake, he knew he worked on the production of CPUs and memories, it was just not his focus. Also, he certainly cared about switching time, but his observation was about transistor count, not switching time.
Also, my over 6 year old DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) CPU[0] is still plenty fast. It’s almost everything around it I have since upgraded (NVMe SSD, RAM, audio interface, video card) to keep overall system performance high.
[0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/77780/i...
The last decade of stagnation in the consumer CPU market was less the end of Moores law and more Intel not needing to do any better because they had no real competition.
I wont argue there wasn't lots of R&D going on behind the scenes, but their current improvements are still on the same architecture they've been using for years - this wasn't something they couldn't have done earlier (especially the prices - surely being able to lower them so much and still make a profit means that consumers were getting screwed earlier?).
CPUs continue to get more powerful, but the minimum hardware requirements for newer editions of operating systems tends to not follow the same curve that new game releases do. (I can't play Rainbow 6 Siege on my Ryzen 5 3550H + GTX 1050 laptop, but CSGO runs fine on it and my i7-2670QM laptop mobo with a GTX 1060 strapped to it.)
This has not been my experience with Windows 7 ==> 10.
I've never played R6 Siege and have no idea how it performs, but I would just like to say that this is effectively meaningless and I hate how games put it in their system requirements. Writing "moderately fast CPU" would carry more useful information. A Westmere Core i3-530 from 2010 is not going to perform anything like a Coffee Lake Core i3-8100B from 2018.
(I'm not that smart, I looked up the model numbers on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i3_micropro...)
> Intel Core i3 560 @ 3.3 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 945 @ 3.0 GHz
Many users have flipped to prioritize power efficiency and quiet operation over speed. And even despite those optimizations, most of their tasks are still bottlenecked as often by their available memory and the quality of their network connection as as their processor.
We just haven’t figured out what to do with all that power in the hands of a user who isn’t super technical, so we’re just spending it on inefficient cruft instead.
And yeah, Moore's Law isn't a law recently. :)
I don't know why they are different.
But it has been a couple hours since your comment and the other replies :)
I get a 58kB HTML document, plus 2kB each CSS & JS, 3 * ~400B images, and a 7kB favicon.
Edit: Oh sorry, RAM. Leaving comment just to compare page size to RAM use for interest.
There's now ~388 comments. Source is 529kb and content 114kb (simple cut and paste of page, no markup).
Those are some impressive ratios.
When I go to NYTimes without an ad blocker, it takes a long tie to show up, it sometimes freezes my scrolling while it loads things, things jump around on the page so when I'm trying to click something I get the wrong target as some ad loads and moves things around, it can be 10 seconds until the page stabilizes after load. I do not experience that with Slack.
How does Slack use so much RAM and CPU and still perform better than a mostly static page of text and graphics? I dunno. But it does. In the end the RAM and CPU usage matter to me theoretically, but all that really matters is the actually experienced interface. The NYT may not be the worst, but it's definitely worse than many, and the comparison to Slack is odd to me, cause my experience with Slack is that is quickly responsive with no lag.
You have a different experience, for you nytimes loads faster and has interactivity with less lag/freezing up than Slack, which for you has a lot of lag/freezing/slow load problems?
They increased core count for every gen starting 8th gen and made a significant leap in perf.
Your processor would give the same perf as the lowest end ryzen.
Not for single core performance though, right? Which is what I'm looking at here.
But the 2700x was a good buy, in retrospect.
Yes it was. 1997 was a long time ago. Kids born that year can legally drink.
Bit of an absurd claim to make, since IM clients 20 years ago had a fraction of the features that Slack has today. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous.
As one of the VP of products where I currently work will say when someone suggests removing this ad or that ad, "Sure. No sweat. OK - now tell me who I should fire."
I checked BBC and CNN, and it seems like they don't have such links (anymore?). Do I remember this incorrectly, or is my browser maybe blocking Outbrain?
Of course, I am not talking about the JS or cookies specifically, but rather the links bought by advert companies that link to scams for cryptocurrencies, binary trading, "health" products and the like. They often have JS exploits. But my main point is I clearly remember the website real estate to be merged between site wide adverts and external scammy adverts.
A few years ago, this was actually on of the main reasons I didn't read websites of otherwise traditional media companies. Or maybe they have taken steps to stop using Outbrain et al.?
As an aside, it matters a great deal in which ordering you place your benefits. Which advantage you 'lead' with can make a great deal of difference between an effective and ineffective pitch, even if all you have done is swap them around in a sentence.
Compare Oatly's [vegan] oat milk which basically uses "Better at frothing than regular milk... and it saves the environment" vs "This milk saves the environment... and it is better at frothing than regular milk." These will read the same to you in the medium of Hacker News but they are markedly different in efficacy.
Kudos to NYT for trying to stop this madness. It’s gone way too far
- Taboola (The supermoon is coming, 17 biggest exercise myths, what is COVID recovery like, Does anyone know if COVID will do away in warm weather)
- Los Angeles drivers are stunned by this new rule for auto insurance. (I live 3000 miles away from LA and have never stepped foot in Southern California.)
- Ron Paul's message for every American.
- The forever spin top, made in Canada (aka we have no ads to sell)
- A background check company (lol)
- MemSQL (probably the only potentially relevant ad)
I would be terrified if my ability to get paid was based on this crap.
Why do people use it? I can understand blocking ads with e.g. ublock, but I cannot understand wanting a browser that shows you desktop ads for internet points.
EDIT: Appears Brave is even holding payments in escrow for parties that did not even sign up to receive payments, that’s not shady at all. Even makes me wonder what’s happening to all the funds in escrow.
Repeating out of date information _per se_ and to ascribe malice is never justified, whatever you think of ads.
However, I think the idea that telling people you were going to be collecting money on behalf of someone, not letting them know, and just keeping it isn't likely to have been some small "whoopsie." Building a system to let people know didn't happen by accident. The $100 threshold wasn't an oversight. Not including visual differentiation between verified and unverified creators wasn't a slip-up. These had to have been purposeful and thought-out decisions.
I don't think the idea was to steal as much BAT as possible from would-be donors, it felt like a growth hack: you know, make it seem like Brave works everywhere, then one day when it is, we can all forget about the fake-it-till-you-make-it bit.
Which is normally fine, but people tend to get defensive about their money.
Further, comments, tweets, etc. generally are not the best way to communicate issues as complex as this, nor do I feel it the public’s job to clean up or go out of their way. You made a mess, you clean it up.
(You appears to be serial down voting; classy.)
Hacker news does not allow you to downvote responses to your comments. (Nor for that matter, can you tell who it was that downvoted you, so that accusation is unfounded.)
When someone does shady things in one area.. they probably do them in others.
It's got some competitors in this respect though. Namely Vivaldi and Edge.
Brave has all the Google integrations removed.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
Browsers today, without strong tracking protection, are passive servants of ad-tech implemented via JavaScript. Average users don't know how to block. Most users don't subscribe widely at risk of overpaying (cross-subsidizing, the publishers call it). Brave's model not only cuts out ad-tech intermediaries, leaving only the browser in the middle — we then let users opt in (with blind signature cryptography so our servers can't link ids or transactions, and via an Ethereum ERC20 token, BAT) to support creators directly yet anonymously.
We will add more over time to support creators, including things like patreon and superchats mediated in the browser (client side and user first), with privacy and pseudonymity as well as anonymity (the default).
I think I see your view as to the "why" of Brave -- how do you see building user trust at scale?
Another concern that comes to mind: Chrome, Safari are backed by companies with massive warchests, and though Mozilla is not as far as I know as liquid as GOOG, AAPL, it has proven staying power. I'm not sure what the term is in the mobile app space when a popular app gets bought up and modified, but what guarantees do I have that the Brave app won't be bought out by unscrupulous dealers down the road?
Does it actually do this? When I had Brave, I never noticed that.
Feel free to link to public documentation on Brave’s site showing the screenshots of Brave’s workflow, policies, etc.
As is, you’re comment assumes I understand a lot of things, which you say I don’t, then go on to not explain them; tip, comments, tweets, etc are a poor place to do this.
For example, what has happened before the 30th day; as in please list from start to finish everything that happens from me downloading Brave, finding myself, making a “payment” to myself, and nothing nothing. Also, if relevant, disclose any and all business policies & procedure; for example, is there a difference between a $5, $101, $1001, etc transaction.
Let’s say the have million in escrow, they invest it, don’t lose any of the funds, and 5 years later end up paying out all funds due.
Does the “all funds due” just the million, is it the million plus the returns they made on million, is it adjusted for inflation because they sat on it 5-years, etc.?
Comparable example might be the funds held in escrow by gift cards; my guess is unless Brave is being super careful what they are doing is or will be defined as illegal.
> A final update on the thread about Brave: they're now opt-in for creators! While it's still possible to tip folks who haven't opted in, the data is stored in-browser and the UI has been clarified. These are good changes, and they fix the complaints I had!
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
> and likely having to buy their crypto to test it
I have 24 BAT and I didn't buy them. I donate some of what I earn from ads to a project maintainer on Github.
> Brave is still selling the tokens for third-parties without their knowledge
Brave doesn't sell tokens. They did raise money through a token sale but that's not relevant.
> System should be you send funds, transfer is not done until 3rd party authorization is received, 3rd party has no fee cash option instead (fees if any paid by donor) — and transaction voids after 30-days.
The transfer isn't done until the creator verifies with Brave. See my comment above.
Doing a minimum of reading (wiki, brave website, reddit) would do wonders for your comments.
What am I missing? You’re basically stealing, fencing the goods, and somehow giving away the proceeds makes that okay and I need to waste my time reading more?
As for doing more reading, sounds like a personal attack, if so, combined with your “Robin Hood” life style, maybe you’re the one that needs to spend more time.
Yes, if you opt-in to the system, they will take a cut, which is entirely reasonable if the model ends up being better for users and creators.
Time will tell if that's the case, but it's an interesting experiment.
It is well-known that Firefox and Chrome do their own tracking. no extension, ublock or otherwise, can change that.
Huh? Firefox has telemetry but the ways to turn it off are well documented.
1. Research the latest settings I need to change in about:config to ensure telemetry & tracking are disabled, and privacy settings are optimized (and hope I got them all).
2. Install ublock origin and possibly other privacy-related extensions (e.g. to block finger printing)
3. Do this on every device which I use... I don’t know about you but I have dozens of devices between myself and my family
4. every time i re-install Firefox or create a new Firefox profile, repeat step #1 and #2.
5. Read the release notes for every Firefox update to ensure there aren’t new or changed about:config settings I should change.
When I can just use Brave instead?
You seriously do all 5 of those steps religiously? Because if don’t, you’re a step or 3 behind Brave’s our-of-the-box defaults.
They rewrote ublock origin in rust, and its native to the product, not tacked on. Shady business model aside, they are making technical contributions to the world.
It also auto-closes tabs I might have browsed in anonymous mode. Safari doesn't, and it's quite a nightmare to fatfinger into anonymous mode and see whatever you had opened anon mode for.
They intended to gimp the API. Not sure if the changes are in effect already though.
>Even if Google were to disallow it and other powerful adblockers, the alternative (similar to content blockers on MobileSafari) is not a serious problem, at least for me. I have Ka-Block! on my iPhone, which blocks ads just fine, despite having a much less powerful interface than uBO.
Good for you. It's not enough for me. I even write my own rules for the sites I visit often.
Content Blockers in Safari submit a list of rules to Safari and Safari blocks the requests. No third party has access to your browser history.
Not that I don't believe you but I can't find any information
Sounds like you compiled a statement like "give me the factors of 26, but you can't use 1, 2, or 13." If you don't opt into it, you definitely aren't using it.
As for why someone would opt into it: some people don't mind being tracked but they care about who's doing the tracking and how their data gets integrated. If Brave shuts down everyone else's tracking but then Brave is building a profile on a user, that's fine for some.
Parent comment said that the business model of Brave is opt in, implying that they’re recommending you use brave but not opt in to the crypto/ad business model. I think it’s perfectly fair to ask what is the value prop of Brave if you don’t use their crypto/ad system.
The fact that so many people get bent out of shape about Brave blocking ads by default is probably also seen as a positive signal by many people who hate ads. If Brave pisses off people who run ad-supported websites, that's a fantastic endorsement.
I’ve never seen anyone angry about Brave blocking ads; what I’ve seen are people angry at Brave blocking ads and adding their own, which is a drastically different complaint.
https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
Using Chrome+uBO+uMatrix and Brave side by side, Brave just works better. Less knobs to fiddle with, sane defaults. Sure I love the power of uMatrix, but it comes with its own time sink managing it. Brave, out of the box, performs correctly in most situations, and switching from default to blocking all cookies, javascript, and fingerprinting is only a click each (and thats the advanced mode.)
Theyve somewhat gone back to the juno/netzero/kmartbluelight internet model. If you did want to be subjected to ads, at least they are in a consistent place in the user interface, and not all over random pages breaking performance and scroll.
If I were forced to choose between two ads types, id pick Braves before the modern webs. Their product is like ad supported shareware. (The rest of the tipping and bat economy notwithstanding.)
> I’ve never seen anyone angry about Brave blocking ads; what I’ve seen are people angry at Brave blocking ads and adding their own, which is a drastically different complaint.
I think for many people who hate ads, this distinction isn't really relevant. They like that Brave pisses off people who run websites with ads. Perhaps disliking website operators enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.
I guess I get people wanting to piss off those who run ads, but that applies to ad blockers as a whole. That’s not an argument for Brave specifically.
For website and ad network operators, it could be worse. Automated 'clickfraud' extensions could have gained traction. Maybe Brave will do that in the future too.
That's one part of the appeal — that this stuff stays local.
Which hopefully was another motivation to cut it back. I mean, "privacy" should be enough, but when it's making your user experience terrible that should be enough too! (Although could lead to trying to performance optimize it instead of getting rid of it; getting rid of it is the right call).