7.5 KiB
title: The problems of browser fascism author: 寮 date: 2022-09-11 16:20:00 tags:technology,internet,webdev,browser threadid: ANRo2kGf2w1W2OtRpo
While most people will think that it's specific to just Chromium, browser fascism has always been around.
What is browser fascism?
When people think of fascism, they immediately think it's all about racism, right-wing, violence, blablabla...
If you seriously think that, then you're absolutely overbloating the term.
Fascism means forcing people into doing, saying, or even thinking in a certain way, even if it's literally impossible.
That's it!
For example, I have a health condition that makes it impossible for me to wear a face diaper.
Yet there are a few deranged lunatics that force me into wearing one, even though it's literally against the "law".
I don't believe in the "law", not those made by governments (which are criminal organizations) that is, but these drones should have been the ones blindly obeying to those.
But anyway, these NPCs is what I call mask fascists.
Likewise, forcing people into using a specific browser and/or version in order to view a websoyte is considered browser fascism.
OS fascism is being included here, simply because browser fascism in current year typically gets doubled with OS fascism.
Netscape
Anyone who had access to the early internet still remembers the "Best viewable in Netscape" buttons.
But it was pretty much the only graphical browser, and internet was no longer HTML-only, so kind of makes sense.
Plus Netscape was available for all operating systems, so that's fine.
Internet Exploiter
This is what really bothered me with the raise of Internet Exploiter.
The buttons "Best viewable in Netscape" changed to "Best viewable in IE4" (and then IE5, IE6, IE7...).
IE was unavailable in Linux, and has never been available, so this rendered so much of the internet unusable.
Most Linux users would probably have given up and switched to WinDOS over that, but someone like me who literally had no idea there's even a WinDOS in the first place, all I thought was "sigh...yet another websoyte stopped working, just boycott it".
And this was made possible because IE blatantly ignored web standards, and instead adopted its own proprietary standards, this was the case with IE4, IE5, especially in IE6, though Microshaft started backing off with IE7 by adopting web standards to at least some degree.
To add insult to injury, lots of websoytes have grown reliant on plugins like ActiveX, Flash Player, and Shockwave.
None of these plugins existed in Linux, though Adobe at one point finally did something unthinkable: releasing Flash Player to Linux.
However, by the time they did so, most websoytes were already in the process of replacing Flash Player by HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, at least the western soytes did, Japanese websoytes still stayed with Flash for a couple more years before they finally realized that web standards actually exist.
And many Japanese websoytes also refused to let their Internet Exploiter dependency go for a very long time after the west have long switched to Furryfox and adrenoChrome, which was very frustrating.
This even resulted in government soytes to be inaccessible to me for most of my life (and nowadays they're inaccessible again because of their dependency on Cuckflare).
Yea I know, as an anarchist I don't need to even consider being able to access government soytes to be necessary, but some of their soytes are pretty useful, like the earthquake and typhoon information ones for example.
Goolag adrenoChrome
After a while of IE dominance, we had a "Best vieawble in Furryfox" for a brief time, until Chrome took over, which is still the case today.
Lots of soytes made by hipsters who can't code and were never supposed to code in the first place use retarded technologies that should have never been invented, like Webpack, Angular/React/Vue/whatever, ECMA, and all the other bullshit all work in the latest version of Chromium and its 1000s of skins (Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera, Iridium.......), fewer on QtWebEngine browsers (qutebrowser, Falcon, Konqueror), much fewer of those work in Furryfox and its skins (Librewolf, Waterfox, Iceweasel, Firedragon, Icecat......), even less on Webkit browsers (Safari, Badwolf, Luakit, Epiphaty), and not at all in any of the independent (and actually good) browsers (Pale Meme, Dildo, Netsurf, Lynx, w3m).
This time there are no buttons, but plain text notices saying something like "This websoyte only works in Goolag adrenoChrome 99 and newer or Furryfox 100 and newer", this is no different from basically saying "if you don't show me your papers, then I will deny you from entering the store", which to any reasonable person is pure fascism and pure evil, although many brainless and soulles government drones don't seem to even realize this as it was made clear over the past 3 years.
What's worse is that more and more websoytes are growing dependent on Cuckflare or some other malicious CDN soyvice.
This is the direct result of their servers being unable to handle their soy apps, so instead of taking the little bit of time to make their shit more lightweight and more usable, they resort to Cuckflare, as they're in denial of the fact that they're a bunch of browser fascists.
And in addition to that, they're even more discriminatory by blanket banning all Tor and most VPN users.
This is a triple middle finger towards the people who are in big danger, political refugees, dissidents, the resistance, and people who just don't want to be tracked wherever they go.
The Any Browser Campaign
All this makes me support the efforts done by the Any Browser Campaign.
A little tip I can give is that you keep the frontend code as close to web standards as possible.
Instead of using a bloated JS framework, just use plain HTML and CSS, and maybe some vanilla JavaScript just to make your pages a bit more interesting, but keep it sane and make sure the content of your website is fully readable and all pages are perfectly navigatable even with CSS and JavaScript disabled.
That way you don't need to worry whether your site doesn't work in certain browsers, always worth to check it to be sure, but I guarantee you that you'll end up spending far less time making frontends from scratch using web standards than you would using a JS-only framework.
It's actually ridiculous that I even have to teach you something this common sense...
Even if you need any of these, provide alternatives.
For example, the comment section on this site is an iframe, but I understand that not all browsers support iframes, which is why the "Comment in SNS discussion here." link, so you can simply click that link, and still see all the comments even without frame support.
Or for one client they wanted me to submit a select box on click, which only works with JavaScript enabled.
So I implemented a submit button wrapped around "noscript" so that you can still make use of that feature if JS is disabled, while those who have JS enabled won't see that button, simply because they don't need it.
Or the way phpBB is doing is pretty clever, as they have certain JS-only features, but if it detects you have JS disabled, it'll replace them with CSS features and/or separate HTML pages instead, so you still have a fully functioning forum software with JS disabled.
And I believe this should be the norm rather than the exception, because unless you make something like Goolag Maps or OpenStreetMap, or a loyve streaming soyvice, there's literally no reason to have JS as a dependency.
By the way, it's 9/11 today, so have a nice teLOLIst day.