Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

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]

[1] I know my hardware is old, obsolete, end-of-lifed by its manufacturer, but come on -- ONE PAGE, one news story, bogs down a machine capable of editing a couple dozen large photos in Gimp at once, and keeps up when overdubbing in Audacity? A single news story on the web Should Not need more computing resources than that!

[2] Sometimes getting a tab process killed confuses the Stainless parent process and I wind up crashing it or hanging it after all, but at least it gives me a pretty good chance of just killing off the troublemaker page.

[3] Unless they've changed it recently, io9 is one of these. I might or might not be able to follow an io9 link on the iPad (Safari there crashes a lot) but I'm better off not trying on the Mac.

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 Facebook. Ah, Facebook. I expect Facebook to be trouble, of course, but a single instance oughtn't be too bad, as long as not much else is happening, right? (If you have two FB tabs open, such as by choosing "open in background" to read / comment on a longish post later without losing track of where you are in your feed, the two sets of scripts seem to be fighting with each other as far as I can tell.) Well if I'm looking at Facebook and get interrupted, when I come back in half an hour, not only has the post I was looking at vanished from my screen and my news feed rearranged so I'll never find that post again unless somebody does something that boosts its visibility or freshness or whatever so FB decides it's new news again ... but also, my CPU will be maxed out by Facebook scripts that consume more reources the longer they run, even if I'm not poking at it.

So an afternoon of trying to catch up on what folks are saying on Facebook means closing the Facebook window and re-opening Facebook in my browser again several times, to keep script creep from getting out of hand. (If I leave a Facebook brower tab open too long, or have two or three Facebook tabs open at the same time, and try to leave a comment, the "we want to know what people thought about saying but then changed their minds about" script (I think) gets so slow that even if I type really, really slowly (because my keyboard is dying), it drops a lot of letters that I type.

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...