Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2016-01-22:

"Every man identifies with Hamlet, it has been said, since every man imagines himself a disinherited monarch; every woman identifies with Alice, since every woman sees herself as the sole sane person in a world filled with lunatics who imagine themselves disinherited monarchs." -- Adam Gopnik

[ http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/who-can-be-finished-with-alice]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)

I'm getting sick of some modern web trends and techniques. And now my usual ways of coping are being subverted.

First, because some sites are just way out of control with the amount of Javascript the include -- loading a single New York Times story in a Javascript-enabled browser will bring my computer to its knees[1] -- I routinely run two browsers: Safari with Java and Javacript turned off for reading almost everything, and Stainless with scripting turned on for hitting the few sites I'm willing to visit that need JS to function, like Facebook and Twitter, and I try to keep the number of open tabs in Stainless to a minimum.

Why Stainless for Javascript and Safari without, instead of the other way around? Because Stainless, inspired by Chrome, makes each tab run as a separate process, o when one web page gets greedy and eats my CPU, I can go to Activity Monitor and just kill off that process without (usually[2]) losing everything else I had open. Also, when I control-click on a link, in addition to the usual "open", "open in new tab", and "open in new window" options, there is an "open in default browser" option. So I can open interesting-looking links in no-scripts-Safari in one step.

And there are some sites I usualy don't bother to go to, because they don'e even load without Javascript, and then they hang my machine so badly I can't get a Terminal window to respond so I can type in the 'kill' command.[3]

Which brings me to Buzzfeed. I opened http://www.buzzfeed.com/meredithtalusan/my-year-without-makeup in Safari (no JS!), and it loaded and I could read it (though with big blank spaces where I presume ads or illustrations were supposed to be), but I noticed that Activity Monitor was showing 100% CPU utilization and a big chunk of that is Safari. Safari, which at this moment has only a single window open, with a single tab, that is displaying that single Buzzfeed article, which the progress indication indicate has long since finished loading, with Java, Javascript, and plugins all disabled, so it should just be a Static Thing being Merely Displayed, already loaded and rendered and Not Executing Anything. Right? So why is it gobbling up my CPU? How is it gobbling up my CPU? And why does a site designer think they need to be Doing So Much Of Whatever It's Doing, just to deliver a little bit of text (and some ads)?

WTF, Buzzfeed?

And then there's scrolling on sites that have static portions of the page, but I want to post a poll about that one first. Meatime, gotta sleeo. Sleeep, yesssss... Probably ranty, crotchety sleep...