Comment by MarkusWandel
1 day ago
Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat.
My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached.
Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback if you go over your limit. Hey, 4x as fast as she had before, effectively unlimited right? Wrong. Bloat was by now such that sites simply wouldn't load at 128kbps. Things timed out before all the bloat was loaded and you would not get the UI regardless how patient you were.
Hacker News still worked of course.
> Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway)
The fallback HTML mode for web search is still there (two flavors even!). You just have to pretend to be an ancient browser.
Using a user agent for something like Firefox 6 will give you a stripped down but still basically modern look and pretending to be something really ancient will get you another, even more basic, HTML version.
I left long ago but the web search team at Google was always pretty serious about making sure you could access results, even from your ancient Timex Sinclair that you hand-whittled out of mammoth bone or whatever.
Gmail is a different story. The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out. IMAP still works though.
Can you still actually get a list of search results with the HTML web search?
I'm developing a new browser engine which has modern CSS features but no JS support, and we were testing with google.com (we can render the modern homepage), but as of mid last year they seem to:
- Hard require JS if you pretend to be Chrome
- Give you an ancient html-only form if you give a custom user agent, which works for "I'm feeling lucky" searches but still requires JS for the results page.
> The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out.
Can you share any info on how to access it?
Trying https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ (the /h/ on the end being the old way to get Basic HTML mode) just redirects back to the normal view and changes the loading screen to say "We're loading the latest Gmail version."
Setting my user-agent to IE6, or IE11 in compatibility mode, produces a "Temporary Error (500)" screen that says "We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for the current status of the service."
Does Search have a basic HTML mode too? Might be worth trying it if so.
There's https://ddg.gg if you don't mind using duckduckgo
Yes, and Firefox Mobile falls into it by default.
The web bloat is definitely real. There are so many things which could be done with a simple HTML form, and often were, that got replaced with huge bloated JS-obligatory SPAs because... "modern".
Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.
Stuff like camera live streams are possible even without HTML. I remember one that used an infinitely-loading GIF. You'd just visit the GIF file directly and it would show you the livestream. It was awesome.
multipart/x-mixed-replace was (and still is?) how IP cameras showed their stream.
> Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out.
For the younger generation that didn't get to witness the glorious old days - there were two approaches. The first one is plain old polling which can be done by using "meta refresh" [1], and the second one is chunked responses [2].
IRC was classically done by the latter method, where the server ran essentially one IRC client binary for each requestor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2481858/how-to-make-php-...
Damn, sounds like internet heaven. You really hit the nail on the head with that modern thing. There's just too many devs out there trying to make the next big thing, the next big trend, to make a name for themselves.
There's nothing wrong with people wanting to make a name for themselves, and nothing will really stop people from wanting to do that. If your frustration is people using a certain technology simply for the sake of it being new, you should be focused on convincing them that isn't necessary to make good/useful tech and make a name for themselves, rather than insulting them for having general ambition.
"People thinking the next big thing needs to be built on bloated, hipster tech stacks is bad" makes sense as an argument/complaint. "People shouldn't be trying to build the next big thing" doesn't make as much sense.
To be fair when you are put on the 128kbps penalty box with the cell provider they also de-prioritize your traffic to the very very bottom of the queue so it's almost impossible to even get the 128kbps, and if the network is busy at all you often get nothing.
but you are correct that modern web frequently leaves low bandwidth high latency users out in the cold, but there are a few holdouts. Craigslist is still pretty usable for example. Hackernews is quite bandwidth friendly. Email is always an option. It's not all doom and gloom for the soda straw crowd.
This was rural though, with the cell tower serving a small town, population 600, and folks on the highway and in the nearby backcountry. As far as we could tell it really was 128kbps. But definitely not enough for the modern (then - this is already 7-8 years ago) web.
We ran out the (then) measly data allotment of the day (500MB) on purpose on the last day of the billing period to try this.
I am on a real "unlimited" 128kbps plan on my phone. I use Firefox and ublock, so a lot of bloat is avoided. The bank app with its simple screens loads with much difficulty. Of course, it's a bank. Most sites load, just give it time. I give up on graphics mostly. YouTube works admirably well. But I agree it is a tad too slow for today. I regularly spend over 1GB a day as I play YouTube with the screen off.
> Email is always an option
Provided you have Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever set up on your computer. That's beyond most grandmothers, who are likely logging into Yahoo or MSN or something.
Ya man, my father (a grandfather) moved here from Poland, not speaking the language with $200, bought a house within 3 years in California, had a successful career in construction management building amazing buildings you might currently be sitting in.... How could he ever figure out Outlook, that takes real concentration and determination reserved only for no name state school cs grads under 40!
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Grandmothers have been computing for long enough to know what an email client is. It is the first thing we setup on my grandma's intel 486 computer (at a time we were all using pentium II and above) when she got dial up.
Had a similar experience. I grew up in a rural area and broadband penetration was late. Later when I bought a house I was lied to by comcast about availability and ended up dialup again. (My fault for believing them tbh) Most of the tricks I used to make the most out of a dialup connection (disable images, disable flash player, load multiple pages so they could be browsed offline) didn't make a difference anymore. In the case of loading multiple pages, lazy loading meant this didn't really work. It was a much more brutal experience than the first go around.
The worst part was how little actual content actually makes up the bloat. Sure video was right out, but I was often struggling to load pages that were mostly text.
The only other option at the time was Hugesnet. After doing the math I determined the data caps were so low dialup was actually cheaper at MBs/month and had less latency issues. Realistically the next best available step up wasn't Hughesnet it was shotgunned 56K.
I grew up in a town that did not get broadband internet access until 2017. Before that people had little to no high-speed internet service other than the town library (and they would park or sit outside the library to use the wifi when it was closed). They would also use cell phone data plans.
A firm I used to do network work for had Hughesnet as failover Internet for a couple locations. I always knew they were on it by the 500ms+ pings. Better than nothing though for sure. And I'd also believe that's typical of any non-Starlink Internet around the end of the 2010s.
Heh. I know someone who uses VoIP via geostationary satellite internet connection. He tried Starlink as an upgrade, however, the 100W continuous power draw was a dealbreaker with his off-grid solar setup. This is off-grid enough not to have cell coverage.
Anyway talking with him on the phone you pretty much have to use a "over" / "over and out" kind of protocol because of the long latency.
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I feel like finding out a house you bought doesn't actually have internet after the fact makes it worthless in the modern world and should be a valid reason to reverse the purchase.
A surprising number of sites still work without js. CNN even, as an example.
Turn off js, and auto image loading and you're getting somewhere.
Or just use http://lite.cnn.com/en. It's great that they still support a "text" version.
I think main use is email and instant messaging providing you don't autoload medias.
> GMail
She can access her GMail account using a mail client like Thunderbird (which is deteriorating, but works), or any one of many other alternatives:
https://rigorousthemes.com/blog/top-free-open-source-email-c...
> Facebook
I could recommend avoiding that particular tar-pit, but if your mom is there, maybe try:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+lite+desktop&ia=web
that's apparently a lighter-weight client, though I can't vouch for it.
And the only reason she doesn’t have access to higher bandwidth is because rural America and conservatives consistently vote for politicians who cut funding for it….
Whether she voted for it or not, she should blame her neighbors who voted for her representatives.
I see what you're getting at, but that doesn't explain bandwidth deserts in parts of rural California. They might have local conservative representatives, but the state leadership is obviously not conservative.