JavaScript has utterly ruined the web, so why does Brendan Eich get congratulated? Bonus: Gemini rising.

Cory Doctorow has recommended the NoScript extension in the past. So do I.

For some years now, the web has been getting fatter and fatter. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks it’s doing much more for the user than it did 20 years ago (except maybe for native media codecs instead of Adobe Flash). Overall, it’s turned into less of a decentralized and open domain for the free exchange of ideas and code and people’s web logs, and more into a corporate shithole of Google, Facebook, and Cloudflare.

In Richard Stallman’s “The JavaScript Trap” essay, he wrote that “web apps” are a danger to computer users because they encourage the use of non-Free software when the user doesn’t consider the problem. That they are applications, that they are written in ways that obscure how they work, that they are copyrighted and proprietary, and…even worse, they run on someone else’s computer, and they can stop you from using them at all after you need them, and spy on you.

I’ve never, personally, seen anything dumber than an office suite you have to be online to use, and apparently enough people agreed with me even if they won’t just switch to LibreOffice, that Microsoft backpeddled from their previous position that there would be no more desktop program, and announced new versions of the desktop Microsoft Office.

In fact, Microsoft’s office programs today are a huge regression over even their own products 20 or 30 years ago, when there was no annoying product activator and this web app nonsense that requires you to be online to edit a document, and then be “encouraged” to save them all to your OneDrive account where the government has access to everything. Also, Microsoft is the second largest advertising network on the internet after Google, and now they can parse anything you’re stupid enough to save on their cloud. (Plus, if you want to use MS Office 95 forever because reasons, Wine runs it just fine.)

So, even if you care nothing for software freedom, you should care about how these applications are taking away control you used to have over your computer, even with a proprietary desktop program. I’ve used LibreOffice for a long time, and the biggest improvement to Chromebooks ever was when they got the Linux subsystem (with Debian) so you can actually run local programs and turn it into something more like a real computer.

As a software _developer_, it may make sense to reuse your existing knowledge of web programming to make desktop applications.

But as a user of applications, it’s extremely annoying to be “asked” to use this hulking monstrosity that runs on Electron (which does the same things, usually, as a browser tab in the browser I already use….hello Element!), or in some bloated browser app.

I have the programming manual for JavaScript 6th Edition from O’Reilly, and the book is easily larger than most books on C, so I don’t really get why people want to write applications in it, other than to foist something nasty on the user, which s/he cannot control.

Only optimized and native code runs with good performance, and native code can be portable code easily enough if you’re competent, write it well, and use common toolkits and abstraction layers (not all of which are particularly heavy). Even the best implementation of a JavaScript runtime can only come to about 70% of the performance of a native application, and if you make native applications, you can take pride in your work.

You can present it to the user and say “I thought enough of you to write this instead of making you use some horrible contraption that pegs your Core i9 and swallows RAM by the gigabytes.”.

Then there’s the issue of unnecessary and malicious scripting.

Many sites use their users. They run advertising scripts, and tracking scripts, and fingerprinting scripts to track them even if they clear cookies and run an ad blocker, and they even use scripts to make your computer mine cryptocurrencies for them. And even when JavaScript is not being used maliciously, it’s quite often pointless. It’s just bags and bags of garbage to add some bling bling. And if you run less of it, you’ll also be more secure, because some of that unnecessary code could even be exploiting a vulnerability in your browser engine.

Once you trust the top-level domain of your banks and some other stuff, you find that 90%+ of the scripts out there are avoidable, and that you’re so much less annoyed (after a while, you’ve whitelisted most of what you want and the workload goes down, and you can export your settings to load into other browsers) that it was worth the effort.

The totality of the JavaScript Trap isn’t just that most of it is non-Free and malicious, it’s that it’s just not good. As in efficient, desirable, anything positive.

I’ve also been perusing “Gemini Space”, which is an alternative to the web that was designed to be simple, lightweight, secure, and text-oriented. That’s not to say it isn’t beautiful. The LaGrange browser makes it pleasant to look at in various ways, including colorizing the text. It’s fun, and it’s a way to get past all of this web nonsense and back to hearing what normal people think.

Gemini is still small, but it’s growing pretty fast and there’s even web to Gemini relays so you can read the news and stuff more pleasantly.

LaGrange is pretty easy to install, since there’s an AppImage. Just drop it somewhere, mark it as executable, and double click.

(I checked the Flathub repo, but laughed, as it wanted over 700 MB of dependencies to bring in a 20 MB program.)

When you see people discussing Gemini, it’s with the point of view that you _can_ achieve the same things using a subset of the very bloated web platform, in a web browser, but they miss the point.

Sure, you can load just about any page that’s out there from back in the day, even in quirks mode, and have it work in a current web browser, but the browsers themselves have become an operating system. A bad one.

The corporate takeover that infested the web with these bloated and semi-incomprehensible “standards”, and DRM where you aren’t allowed to know how it works, and “HTTP” that’s now a binary protocol that would be difficult for something like Prixovy to rewrite, and HTTPS, which relies on signing certificates that are controlled by mega-corporations, is what got us here to begin with, and Gemini is a middle finger to all of this. It’s designed to be easy to learn, easy to share information with others by, quick to load sites, impossible to implement JavaScript-style malware in, and to resist what happened to the web.

In the late 1990s, the web was, relatively, a beautiful place, compared to now. If you wanted to blog, you’d just write some simple HTML template and then add pages to your site. I even had a website. The browsers to handle all of the W3C standards could be had in as little as <1.5 MB. At one point, Opera (then a different browser and company) fit onto a single floppy disk. They were a portable app before it was cool.

Firefox today requires about 1.4 GB of space between its files and the cache it uses. (In floppy disk terms, about 1,000 of them.)

Worse, Microsoft is porting their shitty borderline larcenous ripoff of Chrome to Linux, which gets you Microsoft spyware instead of Google’s. Well, that’s better. Plus, it’s missing the only comprehensible reason anyone would ever open it on Windows. It can embed the zombified guts of Internet Explorer for some corporate intranet site that falls apart in anything else because the consultants who understood how it works are retired or dead now.

Over on Windows, the browser situation is just a self-parodying gag of how Microsoft the company has lost relevance and is falling apart and their only selling point is compatibility with the stuff produced their monopoly trash from 20 years ago.

Windows 11 is a lot of things. Svelte and modern are not among those things. It’s got hundreds of GB of trash out of the gate (and not counting trickery involving file system compression) and no useful software included. Just trials and freemium crap. They give the illusion of simplicity by taking buttons out of the file manager.

Nobody who actually isn’t paid to fix problems with Windows or say they love Windows has anything good to say about it. When I do click on ZDNet, I wish I hadn’t.

It’s said that when someone once asked a tomato farmer why the tomatoes he grew for giant supermarket chains tasted bad, he replied, “They don’t pay me a penny for flavor.”. Microsoft pays ZDNet to regurgitate scripts that were handed to them, to say things without making it obvious who is saying them. It’s a form of information (or in this case, disinformation) laundering.

In fact, most of what real people are saying about Windows 11 would get you fined as-if you caused a nuclear power plant to melt down if you said them on the radio.

In closing, the tl;dr version is modern software is hell. Don’t be like those people. Please value the people who will have to use what you create and make something you’d be proud to use yourself. Don’t be like Brendan Eich. The homophobe who ruined the web.