The enshitified web throws at us websites with autoplay videos that waste copious bandwidth. The waste is not just annoying and eco-hostile, but it sucks dry the credit of people on limited internet connections and grinds CPUs of #permacomputing folks to a crawl.
The best fix in principle would be a browser that disables animations. But it does not exist (reference). It’s an extremely complex problem because there are so many different ways video can forced on people with JavaScript. The developer of Ungoogled Chromium gave up on the effort and even Google have failed in their attempt as well (yes, I shit you not, the big brains at Google could only figure out how to mute the audio).
So the next best option is to identify websites that autoplay video and cancel them. The #uBlacklist plugin is available on Chrome and Firefox. When you get burnt by a shitty autoplay website, you can blacklist so it doesn’t happen again. There is also a mechanism to subscribe to crowd-sourced lists.
Caveat: I’ve not used it myself as the plugin is incompatible with my browser version. It appears it supports certain search engines which I do not use myself, so I’m not sure if it’s useful apart from search results on particular search services.
⚠ The link to jwz.org might have autoplay content, ironically enough. Sorry if that triggers on anyone! Tor Browser is exceptionally able to block the autoplay on that site, so I suggest using TB. I do not like the idea of publicizing MS Github but this link is an alternate which is linked by jwz.org anyway.
I’ll join the handful of commenters shilling for kagi which has domain blocking and ranking as a first-class feature. It really is wonderful if you have the cash, and hopefully it will put pressure on the advertising-funded search engines to add these kinds of features.
I’m looking at the word “permanetworking” and my first thought is we could be a lot more ambitious. The web is such a complex and brittle way to access information it feels like a world away from perma-anything. Still, avoiding wasteful use of bandwidth is always a good thing so I won’t prattle any further.
The web can’t be discarded by individuals after having reached a point where governments mandate that people access the web for gov-administered public services. Otherwise we would have to define “permanetworking” as requiring people to move outside of such jurisdictions. I have opted to stay and fight against mandated gov websites (incl. civil disobedience).
Anyway, HTTP+HTML is not necessarily notably heavy AFAICT (e.g. think Lynx). Web admins are obviously quite reckless on a scale that makes most of the web useless to bandwidth-conserving users. Is your comment is driven by wasteful web design or are you saying that even a lean web service design is still inherently excessive?
Regarding kagi, I’ve not tried it but they do not seem to say a lean web is part of their mission. There are two search services that specialize in lightweight websites:
I agree, as a practical matter it’s another heavyweight tech system that we can’t opt out of. Striving to keep client requirements low so that we can get maximum use out of older hardware is great.
The latter. The web relies on a continuous path of connectivity between the client and the server to function at all. In practice it also requires cooperation on a global scale to make this useful to everybody, whether that’s DNS, CAs for TLS, BGP, undersea fibre optic cables or the big services that “everybody” relies on like AWS and GitHub.
When somebody says a word like permanetworking, to me that’s an invitation to think small. If you want to create something local, networking offers a lot more possibilities for action than, say, semiconductor manufacturing. Bluetooth chat, neighbourhood WiFi with local servers, long distance email via sneakernet, distributing useful data packages like maps, books and encyclopedic data so that they’re stored close to the people who need them. There’s so much we can do without climate-controlled datacenters.