It's seemingly becoming harder to have an "experience" on the Web, and I find myself turning away from progressively more sources as a result.
In the 2000s, running with an ad blocker was a near surefire way to speed up loading a page without any functional issues cropping up - the ad blocking tech even then was _good_.
Then came paywalls - pay for this content, or you won't see it. I suppose, then, I won't see the content.
Then came JavaScript frameworks in the 2010s - ads weren't assets anymore, they were actually part of the content. But for the most part, the Web still worked without JavaScript, and many sites (for what reason, I still don't totally understand) would gracefully fall back to presenting "just the content" if JavaScript was disabled. So I traded an ad blocker for NoScript, turning the lot of it off instead. Some sites need a minimal amount of JS to function, which I'll allow (first-party and CDNs like `jsdelivr`). But if you require JS from stripe.com, I suppose I also won't see then content.
But eventually those JavaScript frameworks became bold - displaying partial content, or no content at all, became the fallback. I count the "Continue reading" button among these (and I get why - tracking who actually read the article must be vastly more lucrative than counting pageviews), though some pages are so bold as to display _nothing_ but the "You need to enable JavaScript" text itself.
Most recently, I've noticed a new tactic: setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page. Removing the rule with dev tools shows the entire page. I can only assume this is a way to make sure the page doesn't become visible until all of the content is loaded, but again, the content includes the ads, upsells, and otherwise.
Thankfully I've logged into Hacker News and posted this comment without JavaScript enabled. I wonder how long I'll be able to do that.
In the 2000s, running with an ad blocker was a near surefire way to speed up loading a page without any functional issues cropping up - the ad blocking tech even then was _good_.
Then came paywalls - pay for this content, or you won't see it. I suppose, then, I won't see the content.
Then came JavaScript frameworks in the 2010s - ads weren't assets anymore, they were actually part of the content. But for the most part, the Web still worked without JavaScript, and many sites (for what reason, I still don't totally understand) would gracefully fall back to presenting "just the content" if JavaScript was disabled. So I traded an ad blocker for NoScript, turning the lot of it off instead. Some sites need a minimal amount of JS to function, which I'll allow (first-party and CDNs like `jsdelivr`). But if you require JS from stripe.com, I suppose I also won't see then content.
But eventually those JavaScript frameworks became bold - displaying partial content, or no content at all, became the fallback. I count the "Continue reading" button among these (and I get why - tracking who actually read the article must be vastly more lucrative than counting pageviews), though some pages are so bold as to display _nothing_ but the "You need to enable JavaScript" text itself.
Most recently, I've noticed a new tactic: setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page. Removing the rule with dev tools shows the entire page. I can only assume this is a way to make sure the page doesn't become visible until all of the content is loaded, but again, the content includes the ads, upsells, and otherwise.
Thankfully I've logged into Hacker News and posted this comment without JavaScript enabled. I wonder how long I'll be able to do that.