20220314-light_x.txt
As a follow up to my no_x glog entry, I have installed X to my
Thinkpad. The main reason is Javascript. I can't do certain things
(like banking) without it. I'm not one of those people that hates JS.
I think it's actually a pretty neat technology. The problem, IMO, is
that it is sometimes too easy to exploit and use for nefarious
purposes by the coder against the user. My typical WWW experience is
using a JS whitelist: it has the advantage of making sure I know who
is using JS in my browser session.

The biggest drawback is that it takes time to add sites I want to use
to the whitelist. It does waste time usually. But the peace of mind I
get is pretty much worth the trouble. It's really nice if the browser
devs anticipate things like this: Via and Brave (both on Android) make
it pretty easy to add JS whitelist entries via a few taps (which is
100x better than the "old" method of copy/pasting every stinking URL
into some obfuscated JS whitelist settings page)

Also, I've come to really hate lazy-loading. That's a good example of
just plain STUPID use of JS. If you require JS just to pop an image,
you're an a**hole. If your server can't handle loading too many images
without lazy-loaders, redesign your site or figure out what thumbnails
are. A lot of my image-based browsing is on links2 -g. I can't tell
you how much time it usually saves because it has the great advantage
of toggling images on and off (if some goober decides having 100
images at HD quality on a single page is a great idea) and acting much
like Lynx. I'm not much of a fan of the Links2 TUI as it just seems
like a less-useful compromise between Lynx and Links2 -g.

Honestly there are 2 things that keep me from ditching Lynx and just
sticking with Links2: 1. Gopher support 2. Vim keymapping.  I've
thought about using Elinks as it technically has Gopher support, but
it's disabled by default and in my experience it crashes more often
than Lynx or Links2. Also, if you haven't deduced it by now, I don't
like compiling programs. I will if I really want to, but in my
experience there's a 50% failure rate because some stupid dependency
won't be there. 

But I'm slowly getting used to doing more and more in the TUI/CLI
environment than I have before. Framebuffer is awesome.