Why are browsers so slow? - <AUTHOR> http://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/why-are-browsers-so-slow/ <comment><USER4> > But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I > could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn't care, it worked incredibly > fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a > sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, > Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working > with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier back then than working with ten > in today's Safari or Chrome. But that's a whole different story. What would > you do today if you opened a link and saw a long article which you don't > have time to read right now, but want to read later? You would save a link > and close the tab. But when your browser is fast, you just don't tend to > close tabs which you haven't dealt with. In Opera, I would let tabs stay > open for months without having any impact on my machine's performance.

This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. And it doesn't reload every page when I quit and restart my browser -- it only loads a tab when I click into that tab. And it has tab groups so that my current group has only about 8 tabs in it, and the other groups are sorted by topic. And on and on.

I find it frustrating when people post these articles as if everyone has this problem, and don't provide enough details as to their setup so that people can help them fix it. I promise you -- if everyone around the world right now had the problem the author was having, it would have been solved. No one would stand for it. Rather than assume everyone is suffering just like you, assume that other people either a) don't behave the way you do, or b) have found a way to fix the problem.

<comment><USER5> > This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's > sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous.

Which platform are you on? Which Firefox version? Stock or tweaked? Any special add-ons? I use Firefox on OS X and it crawls after 10-15 tabs. Consumes many gigs of memory. Chrome isn't any better. It just splits the memory consumption among multiple processes.

I don't remember browsers being this slow on Linux. Time to go back to the magic land.

<comment><USER6> 400 tabs. Including several active fancy SPAs, like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS.

Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus), Windows 10, just over 400 tabs open, under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM (on a 16GB machine). If I freak it out by doing a bunch of flipping through dormant tabs, I can spike CPU pretty good as it does layout on fifty tabs at once, but who cares, I don't do that. I do find that I need to restart my browser every few hundred tab open/close cycles, which takes under 30 seconds (just did the restart, that dropped RAM use to 1.3GB, but it'll get back up to 1.9 pretty soon). Restarts used to be a lot less frequent, and a lot faster, before work required me to keep two slack clients open. Running multiple YouTube windows at once seems to be bad for uptime.

Regarding OP's complaints, opening a new tab take imperceptible time, a new window is about half a second (only marginally slower than notepad), and switching tabs can be done several times per second.

I have put ZERO effort into make Firefox run faster, unless you count running AdBlock. I haven't even bothered to figure out which is the best adblocker.

Why do people use Chrome, again?

(edit to add a few details)

<comment><USER7> >400 tabs >like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS. >under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM

Any proofs? Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs, and you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time.

<comment><USER8> > Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs

about:tabs (see [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab- stats/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stats/) ) is showing me "151 tabs" and "57 tabs have been loaded" for my current session. The other 90-some I haven't looked at this session, so they're left unloaded. I can post a screenshot, but I could fake that just as easily as I could fake my claims above, so it's not any more "proof".

I'm certainly doing other things right now (e.g. compiling).

It _really_ depends on what you have in your 100 tabs. If you have 100 copies of gmail, you're more likely to have a bad time than if you have 100 sane pages. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't see the correct answer yet, so I'll just tell you, tabs have a delay to create because in almost all modern browsers you have to wait for a process to be created and for everything to be paged in, _then_ wait for a bunch of IPC calls to complete.

Old browsers didn't do this, so creating tabs was so fast! But they were also much easier to compromise. Tradeoffs.

Source: Electron maintainer

<comment><USER10> Commenting just to add visibility to the only plausible answer I've seen to the question as posed. Thanks for not getting sidetracked into arguments about adblock/JS engines/layout/fonts/etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow this tab madness... I want one row of tabs, and I want to see the page title on the tabs. I get an itch when I get enough tabs that they just become little favicons so I can't see what the tab is doing (By that time there is a 99% chance it's garbage and I don't need it- but now I don't know!).

I wish there was some system of grouping tabs, e.g. if I visit a newpaper site and Ctrl+Click 3 article links it would keep those tabs "under" the main site tab, and the tab would only display "nytimes.com (4)". As long as I'm viewing one of them, the tabs of that particular domain would expand and other sites would collapse.

Is there a browser or chrome plugin that does this?

<comment><USER12> > I wish there was some system of grouping tabs

Like Tab Groups? FireFox has had them since forever, but since "nobody" used them, it was removed. You now need an extension to regain that functionality:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups- pa...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups- panorama/?src=search)

You also have tree-style tabs, which organizes tabs based on their parent tabs (those they were opened from):

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- tab/?src=search)

You have several options. Unless of course you use Chrome, in which case Google has said "fuck you" to actual power-users and choice ;)

<comment><USER13> > Unless of course you use Chrome,

... then you could try Vivaldi, which has nice features when it comes to tabs (stacking, tiling, vertical tab list). No tree-style, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure what the author is talking about. After my recent tab clean-up, I've got 35 tabs open. Opening a new one is near-instantaneous, and I can say the same thing about bringing up any other tab I have open, as long as it has been loaded since the last time I restarted my browser.

I've got an Atom-based 2014 laptop at home. That one might take a second to open a new tab if I'm doing anything else on it at the time.

Modern browsers handle a higher load than older ones did; a more complex web means a greater amount of more complex data, and that means more complex data management. The overhead is higher (there's a lower floor), but it allows the browser to scale better (higher ceiling).

<comment><USER15> I have a Intel Atom 1.6 GHz/2GB of RAM netbook afrom 2009 with Linux on it, and Firefox/Chrome is the only unusable app on it; other Linux applications seem to be fairly responsive on the hardware.

I really feel the slowness on that one. Tab switching takes seconds, other interactions take seconds (especially on sites with javascript), Facebook.com is unreadable (script takes too long).

It is just an anecdote, but at least on Linux the browser is what makes older computers obsolete.

PS: Interestingly, some minimalist WebKit-based web browsers seem to work fine on there (like uzbl), of course that comes with a huge downside of no sync, practically no addons, and so forth.

<comment><USER14> I've also got a similar machine (Lenovo S10-2), which I used as my primary laptop for a few years. Using the web on it was painful even 5 years ago. Almost as bad as the 2003 IBM laptop sitting next to it in my closet.

The author was talking about a 2014 iMac, 5 years newer than your netbook and likely 3-4x the price. They're running a modern OS with a browser (Safari) claimed to be 1.4x - 7x faster (by Apple's numbers on their Safari page) than the Firefox browser that I use. So that's what I'm wondering about. By the author's description, their premium 2014 computer isn't running a browser as well as my super-budget refurb 2014 computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Chrome is the culprit. For as much as they helped with V8 innovations, they've also done harm

\- ignores usability basics: horrible UI with > 10 tabs, reloads all tabs, many other issues - all of these are things people have complained about forever, they refuse to fix

\- memory hog: Chrome uses more memory than almost any other browser

\- Google forces Chrome upon you since Hangouts etc will not work with other browsers

\- for reasons passing understanding, the Chrome UI has been copied by every browser

Firefox is better at every single thing and has a far better extension model, which sadly they will deprecate again to copy Chrome. I find it very sad that its popularity and market share has fallen as the world has collectively dumbed down the browser UI.

<comment><USER17> Chrome is quite clearly targeted at the regular user, rather than the power user or developer/tinkerer. News flash: the regular user does not open 270 tabs, or even 10 tabs. You can tell me this claim is anecdotal, but since you have provided no evidence to substantiate your claims, I'd say the burden of proof falls on you first.

> "Firefox is better at every single thing" Ouch. I mean, your post is > littered with unsubstantiated claims, but that has to be the biggest and > least substantiated of them. For starters, I think Chrome is a good deal > further down the line in terms of ES6/ES7 and WebGl. Chrome is certainly > ahead in the implementation of Web Platform features like Web Components and > a large number of CSS properties.

I see a lot of websites which advise non-Chrome users to switch to Chrome to view the website in question -- which is horrible, but one could hardly say Firefox is therefore better at WebGl, for example.

I've also used Firefox/Firefox Web Developer Edition/Firefox Nightly many times of the years and I have generally preferred Chrome's dev tools. The ability to simulate slow network connections and to drag and reorder DOM nodes is nice in Chrome, and in general I find the dev tools to be more reliable when I'm messing with CSS properties.

The reality is that I have to use both browsers in my line of work anyway, but just wanted to say that. Obviously your retort will be that Firebug is the best, but that's kind of my point: I do not think you can say of Firefox that it is better at 'every single thing' if it must first be augmented by add-ons. Firebug will be discontinued eventually anyway when multi-process lands in stable Firefox.

So, I wouldn't say Firefox is better at every single thing. Maybe Firefox with a dozen add-ons is better than Chrome at some things, but that's the point. Regular users, and even busy developers/tinkerers, do not want to waste time configuring and setting up their browser. They just want something that will work. Chrome works better out of the box for the regular user.

\</comment></comment><comment>-----

Regarding Chrome's UI, I think it caught on for a reason: just like websites have become flat and streamlined, the browser has also become more minimal in its UI, and Chrome very much led the charge there. Of course, Firefox is to be applauded for allowing the user to pick and choose which bits of the UI are visible and which are in the menu -- that's a great feature, I wish I could configure/style Chrome.

But before Chrome, this option did not exist (unless there was an add-on, it's been so long I forget), and the FF user interface had a dozen buttons, two text fields (address & search), a bottom status bar and so on. It was too much clutter. Chrome streamlined the browser UI and put things in a more logical order: tabs, then search/address, then web content. It was and is well- designed from a UI/looks perspective for the regular user.

Clearly, you are a power user and possibly a developer, so you will perhaps be more prone to having hundreds of tabs open and more inclined to spend time making everything about your browser _just so_. I can appreciate that. I've poured hours into browsers, tiling window managers, etc. I just don't think I'd advocate dwm/xmonad/awesome-wm to a regular user, and neither would I say a window manager represents a superior product to a desktop environment. A product isn't superior if you have to assemble/mod it yourself. This is a cornerstone of Apple's success, and VLC Media Player's success, and Google Search's success, and so on: to provide something that _just works_ , rather than something which needs to be modded.

\</comment><comment>-----

No one can deny that Google has far greater reach and clout when pushing its browser down people's throats, but many developers prefer Chrome now, and not just 'rockstars', but older developers too. I do not believe they are 'casuals', I think they genuinely prefer the way Chrome works, and I think its market share is not testament only to Google's marketing power, but also to the fact that it is a successful and effective web browser.

Google Search maintains dominance today in search because of its marketing and its huge lead in terms of data, but it only reached its current level because it ultimately worked better than its competitor products. I think the same is true of Chrome -- when it started out, it represented a fast and sleek new browser product, and while it has gotten overweight as time has progressed, it still beats the competition out of the box.

\</comment><comment>----

PS: I am not a Chrome salesman. I have many complaints about the product, (especially on mobile, where I think it is spectacularly weak, but that's another story). I just found your claims a little too rash. Even 'polemic' isn't adequate to describe it.

<comment><USER12> > Chrome is quite clearly targeted at the regular user, rather than the power > user or developer/tinkerer. News flash: the regular user does not open 270 > tabs, or even 10 tabs

If that is your impression, I got news for you.

Regular users don't even know tabs exist, and every single tab opened goes unclosed.

My wife had some 200 on her iPad. Every time she opens a tab and can't click "back" she says the internet is broken again.

(And ofcourse she can't find her previous tab in that mess of unmanaged tabs)

Regular users have a lot of tabs too, but for completely different reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you're in a recent Firefox, open a new tab to the URL "about:performance" \-- it will show you a report on how your add-ins and tabs are affecting the browser. One of my coworkers used it to find that a tab from a IoT device controller page was slowing down the whole browser by doing lots of unnecessary page refreshes.

<comment><USER19> "about:performance may currently be slowing down Firefox"

<comment><USER20> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199987](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199987)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't have this problem, blank pages don't take "seconds" to load, even on my little atom-based tablet. The big question I have for people noticing this behavior is how many add-ons do they have. How many times is your "blank page" parsed by an enormous amount of code written in a language not known for its performance?

<comment><USER22> If your browser is designed from the ground up to support add-ons, but can't handle a couple of them without slowing to a crawl, your browser sucks. Don't blame the user for a problem with the software.

<comment><USER14> > your browser sucks

Why not all three? The browser implementation, user's choices, and the implementations of each individual add-on suck.

The browser didn't limit the resource use of greedy add-ons (or inform the user of conflicts between them), the add-ons were coded either to do too much, or to perform their function with suboptimal code, and the user is the one that chose that set of software to use together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart > them.

firefox does not do this.

<comment><USER24> Additionally, it's debateable whether that's a bad default to begin with.

<comment><USER25> "load all tabs" on restart is a terrible default for people who like to have dozens of tabs. I can't see any reasonable argument for it, for those users.

<comment><USER26> I actually want this to happen in all of my tabs because I want them to UPDATE. This is why I keep them open in the first place.

<comment><USER27> I think that the mechanism I suggested elsewhere would handle this best: each tab's complete state (DOM, JavaScript &c.) should be marshalled to disk at quit (and checkpointed periodically, in case of crashes); on startup, all tabs are loaded and their DOM & JavaScript contexts restored. If a tab's context had it set to update periodically, then that periodic-update context would be restored; if not, then the remote server would never be contacted until and unless the user hits reload.

This seems so obviously correct to me that I wonder what I'm missing.

<comment><USER28> > This seems so obviously correct to me that I wonder what I'm missing.

You are missing that

> should be marshalled to disk at quit

is not easily doable.

<comment><USER27> Why not? The DOM is, ultimately, just HTML. The VM state is just data in RAM, which should be eminently serialisable.

I'd think it's the sort of thing which ought to be child's play.

<comment><USER28> The VM state isn't that easy when you remember that JS can keep open sockets to other things, can launch processes, etc.

Sure, you could find a way to serialize it, but that'd be a lot harder — you can't hust go back to halfway the middle of receiving something through a socket.

<comment><USER27> One could just close open connexions — after all, a network connexion can always die anyway.

I really hope that JavaScript in a browser can't launch processes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> All of these anecdotal benchmarks people are doing are silly because you're overlooking so much detail:

* SSD or slow spinning disk (makes a massive difference if your computer is swapping out tabs to cache).

* Have the tabs been loaded or not (a new browser session will open placeholders for the tabs without loading the site, but an older session will likely have dozens -if not more- of those sites loaded)

* Frontend code. Are we talking low footprint sites like HN or dozens of JS and CSS heavy sites like Facebook, Office 365, etc)

* Similarly to the above, media content. Streaming videos? Flash? etc.

I bet you a 100 active tabs of MS Excel Online would perform crap in any set up while 100 inactive HN tabs would stand a better chance of not crippling your whole system.

<comment><USER30> If you have 100 tabs doubtfully all of them are relevant. That's more like a user problem.

<comment><USER29> It's an easy habit to make though. Like why some people have lots of stuff saved to their Windows desktop, or messy desks with paperwork from a dozen different projects arranged in a way that only the person sat at that desk could understand. I doubt many people set out to work that way, it's more a symptom of the "I'll leave that there and come back to it when I get more time" mindset. Except unfortunately one never finds the time.

I can't really blame people for doing that given our hectic modern lives.

<comment><USER30> "Leave it there and come back when i got more time" = Bookmarks :)

If it is a dynamic website, most of them have sessions that expire.

<comment><USER29> > _" Leave it there and come back when i got more time" = Bookmarks :)_

Let me reiterate the first part of that sentence you've quoted: "I doubt many people set out to work that way, it's more a symptom of the "I'll leave that there and come back to it when I get more time" mindset."

> _If it is a dynamic website, most of them have sessions that expire._

That depends entirely on how long the session cookies are set for, whether the user browses to other pages on that site since (thus potentially renewing their session cookie) and whether one even needs to have an active session to use that specific dynamic website. Suffice to say there's more exceptions your point than there are examples of it. eg message boards, youtube (and other similar video streaming services), imgur (and similar), etc. And even in instances where the session only manages access to that page, it's not a great chore to log in again.

To be honest I don't really understand why you're trying to lecture HN readers about sensible browsing habits. We're all tech-savvy enough to know how to use a browser. If we chose to adopt a workflow that's less CPU / system memory performant then we do so fully understanding the problems that might arise. The problem is many of us - myself included - grew up in an era when websites were a document rather than an pseudo-desktop application so often our ranting stems from a frustration at how bloated the web has become.

<comment><USER30> Some of the websites you mentioned keep you logged in. So bookmarks work fine.

I don't understand what is so upsetting about mentioning a feature designed for that use case.

Then, not all HN readers are tech-savvy, being enthusiastic about technology is not the same as being tech-savvy.

Then, if you don't like having your point refuted, don't engage into a conversation by refuting others' point of view in the first place.

<comment><USER29> > _Some of the websites you mentioned keep you logged in._

Indeed. Which was the point I literally just made after you argued about sessions timing out.

> _Then, not all HN readers are tech-savvy, being enthusiastic about > technology is not the same as being tech-savvy._

It sounds very much like you believe you're educating people here. I'd be surprised if anyone reading this thread was unaware of the existence of bookmarks, or confused by the revelation that more tabs mean their "computer thingies" have to do more "thinking". But I can't prove that any more than you can prove most HNers are as technologically inept as you repeatedly suggest.

> _Then, if you don 't like having your point refuted, don't engage into a > conversation by refuting others' point of view in the first place._

You're not refuting my point though because my point was never that tabs are better than bookmarks. I just commented on why people often end up working that way despite knowing better. It was an insight not a recommendation.

<comment><USER30> Lots of accusations there. The only thing I suggested is to use bookmarks, and imply that it's highly unlikely that in an audience as diverse as HN ALL of them, or the majority of readers are tech-savvy... Run a survey if you want.

I made a reasonable suggestion without an intention to offend people. Hacker News is about sharing information. I am sharing information.

You want to start your Monty Python argument clinic in the Hacker News comment section? I am not interested. Take your unreasonable accusations elsewhere.

<comment><USER29> With the greatest of respect, I think you're reading subtext in comments where there was none:

1stly I said "tech-savvy _enough to run a browser_ ". The context here is critical (hence my emphasis) because I'm not talking about our level of technical competence but rather the basics of using a browser (ie using tabs and bookmarks). You may disagree and think some on here are unaware of bookmarks but I think that's extremely unlikely. However I think taking proper context of my point into account, you likely don't disagree me. Which is why your rebuttals always crop out the context I included.

2ndly I was never offended by your suggestion to use bookmarks. In fact I didn't even disagree with you. I wrote about why some people don't use bookmarks and how I don't blame them for their arguably bad practices. It seemed that you misinterpreted that as an argument in favour of tabs and thus constructed arguments around disproving that point. That wasn't necessary as there wasn't ever a disagreement there. Maybe I should have been more clear early on?

Lastly I've not made any accusations about you. Let alone unreasonable ones. I may have disagreed on a few specific points but I think the "accusations" term is a tad exaggerative. If you feel I have said things that could be taken personally then I apologise, that was never my intention. :)

Couple the above points with your reiterating my counterargument about login sessions and hopefully you can see why I was a little frustrated at the weird direction this discussion took. At every turn you seemed hell bent on disagreeing with me even when we were agreeing. If you don't mind me asking, maybe your initial comment getting downvoted (wasn't me by the way!) left you feeling you needed to prove your point? I've never agreed with negative rep but that's a whole other tangent.

Anyway, since we never actually disagreed on the crux of the argument I think we should just chalk this down to a misunderstanding and get on with our lives :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wrote a simple bit of code to calculate the size of index pages with includes (js, css, images) and here's what I get:

      page	  resource	total   url
      (b)	   (b)		(Kb)
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
      33857	   143		34.0	news.ycombinator.com
      62690	   55975	118.7	arstechnica.com
      11844	   223862	235.7	seldomlogical.com
      218837   765943	984.8	newyorktimes.com
      l592771  545304	1138.1  guardian.co.uk

The one thing I notice watching the index page being broken down, is the sheer number of resources requested. Didn't bother with JS/browser interaction which you can check with browser dev tools.

<comment><USER32> Would enjoy seeing the source.

<comment><USER31> read away ~ [https://github.com/peterrenshaw/pageglut](https://github.com/peterrenshaw/pageglut)

<comment><USER32> Thanks!

<comment><USER31> and write-up why ~ [http://seldomlogical.com/2016/JAN/27/measure-that- page/](http://seldomlogical.com/2016/JAN/27/measure-that-page/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm very surprised to see that nobody has mentioned OneTab.[1] With my use of Chrome, it performs fine with hundreds of tabs open until I attempt to reopen them after a restart, at which point I'll be waiting for about 5 minutes until I can do anything. Firefox seems better for this as it only loads tabs when I actively select them IIRC.

Regardless of performance, with that many tabs open I just find browsers unpleasant to use because you can't see the title of each tab and switching between them is a mess. OneTab is fantastic - I have it as a pinned tab on all my browser windows and I send it all the tabs I'm not actively using. For me it also doubles as a short-term bookmarking system so I don't clog up my pinboard.in bookmarks with articles I have not yet read etc.

[1]: [http://www.one-tab.com/](http://www.one-tab.com/)

<comment><USER34> Somewhat similarly, "The Great Suspender" for Chrome and similar extensions unload unused tabs after a configurable timeout, requiring a click to reload them.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en-US)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Something I've found very useful for Chrome is "The Great Suspender" extension.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

It frees up lots of memory but still lets me keep lots of tabs around without having to be militant and killing them off as I stop using them.

<comment><USER36> Firefox also have extensions like that. I'm using [http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en](http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en) / [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend- tab/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/)

It's marked as experimental, but I haven't had any trouble so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Surely there's a trade off, as we add more and more features to browsers, w3C specifications, add ons, JavaScript updates etc, a browser will inevitably get slower. Yes older browsers were fast, but they did little in comparison to today's virtual machines.

The fact that you can do this [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BV32Cs_CMqo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BV32Cs_CMqo) in a browser should tell you we've come a long way from them just being Document readers.

</comment><comment><USER38> >Unfortunately, modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. Which takes ages if you have a hundred of tabs. Opera was sane: it did not reload a tab unless you asked for it. It just reopened everything from cache.

Firefox also loads suspended tabs from cache. It reloads them(on first switch to tab), but no data is downloaded from server.

<comment><USER39> Not fully true. If you open a large session and have a network sniffer on, you'd see likely at least dozens of requests for favicon.ico from half of internet :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Browsers are slow, but I can cope with it. But what I hate is that browsers are nondeterministic.

Try Ctrl+C,Ctrl+T,Ctrl+v,Enter combo. In opera it worked flawlessly everytime. In Firefox, it sometimes works, sometime it opens new tab without URL, sometime it pastes half of URL (?!) and navigatest there.

In chrome you never know what sugesstion will the address bar give to you. In opera, you were 100% sure that your bookmarks will be there, so you could do Ctrl+T, type first few letters and press Enter without looking.

<comment><USER41> I do that in Chrome all the time. I hardly ever go to any sites except by typing the first ~three letters of the URL and mashing enter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> As usual, this is simply not true in general. If your system is doing 10 other things and is memory/CPU constrained then, sure, you probably know why it's taking so long.

If you have 100 tabs open of which 10 are rather badly-behaved, maybe the browser cannot do enough to mitigate it. But again, although this is a common power-user setup, it's not standard.

If none of the above, it's likely due to an extension. I was starting to blame Safari for slow tab opening and page loading recently and then I uninstalled an extension and everything became lightning fast again. I have around 100 tabs open across 4 windows. All major browsers are very fast for normal browsing in the default configuration.

</comment><comment><USER43> "Why are browsers so slow?"

Site downloads almost 500KB of fonts.

<comment><USER44> THIS. If you want a fast website, remove all JS and make everything simple. For maximum performance put the static site on a CDN. It isn't hard.

<comment><USER45> And, obviously, websites apparently don't want a fast website. Empirically, they want the slow, JavaScript frameworky, image heavy, ad heavy, social media link-ful they have. Unfortunately, as a user, I want their website to be the opposite of what they want their website to be.

<comment><USER46> Reader mode is such a relief. I wish there were a way to enable it by default.

<comment><USER47> There are extensions that enable reader mode by default, for example [Automatic Reader View][0].

[0]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic- rea...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-reader- view/?src=api)

<comment><USER46> Thank you! I had never heard of this, and I'm installing it now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Your problem might be disk IO speed related. How fast is your storage? Most browsers still do trash a lot of disk IO even if you have plenty of memory available. For whatever reason it seems like OSX is way more prone to having performance problems due to slow disk IO. I have plenty of RAM, CPU and GPU so whenever I see a performance hiccup I know it's time to clear some space off my SSD. Performance of my (several year old, third party) SSD goes off a cliff when it has less than 15% or so free space available. If I get it back to 20% free space it's back to smooth sailing again.

</comment><comment><USER49> I downloaded the latest version of Opera this weekend after a lot of frustration with Chrome's drain on my Mac's battery life. Man was I shocked. It uses the same engine as Chrome (Blink) but somehow manages to double the amount of battery life on my machine. I could never get more than three hours on my Retina MBP before I tried it.

And it supports Chrome extensions, to boot.

<comment><USER50> If only Opera had built-in Flash, I would consider this more. Too many sites require Flash still sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Installing Ghostery, Privacy Badger and adblocker makes a world of difference in terms of how fast page loads are for me. Ads are not just annoying, they slow the web down considerably and make the mobile experience terrible.

<comment><USER52> Why would you use adblocker/ublock and 2 other extensions which are no more than a filter lists for adblocker/ublock?

<comment><USER53> Privacy badger is a little different, afaik it doesn't use lists.

<comment><USER52> It says in the FAQ section of the official site that the main difference between it and other blocking extensions is ease of use aka lack of setup. It also claims it's based on adblock code. So it's just adblock with lists preset? Indeed a little difference if you're able to setup adblock-like extension. And if we're discussing performance, you don't want an extension for every list out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> So, incidentally I noticed a couple days ago that Firefox on Android handles > 99 tabs with a special icon.

I found that quite amusing..

[http://m.imgur.com/ZmGsWRo](http://m.imgur.com/ZmGsWRo)

<comment><USER39> On Chrome it's ':D' \- I guess due to UI constraints

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> It was the same thing i posted about Apps made with Web Tech.

Opera 1x, managed to be a email client, RSS reader and Browser while keeping the size below 12MB. Chrome/Blink or Firefox all takes 40-50MB Download.

I really wish they could Open Sources the old Opera.

P.S- I am not sure if these Tab Problem is nerd only. Basically people are trying to gob too much information. But i have yet to see a Sane UI to fix this.

<comment><USER56> Yeah and QNX booted you into a graphical environment from a 1.44mb floppy..

I never really understand comments like these, what are you saying? You want smaller binaries? Less features?

Don't you have a spare 50MB on your 512GB SSD?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> (disclaimer: I work for Opera) This year Opera has had a lot of focus on performance tuning under the umbrella of Power Saving Mode that was shipped in Opera 39. It was many small optimizations like for example reducing timer frequency in unused tabs or UI animation fixes as well quite advanced memory compaction that is now being upstreamed ([https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink- dev/oZw5F3fO-aU)). Recent Opera 42 features a small but nice update to startup p/restart behaviour - it schedules only the most important/recently used tabs for reload right away - which is quite useful for people like me who normally have dozens of tabs open all the time.

</comment><comment><USER58> > _" You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would > you even manage that? "_

I currently have nearly 400 tabs open, across 7 browser windows (Firefox).

The main reason for this is context switching. I have tried several context switching type addons but not found one yet that is reliable, simple and fast. Right now if I am programming, I have 2 browser windows I use for that. For news and related articles of interest, 1 browser window. For games and related, 1 window, etc, etc.

Firefox and Tabmix plus makes this easy and relatively painless. Chrome would have about 12 million processes and use 4.7 petabytes of memory for same use case (I exaggerate a smidgen)

</comment><comment><USER59> Browsers are slow because objective metrics of quality (e.g. performance, usability) are irrelevant to the common user, despite what individuals may claim. People are very susceptible to branding and growing trends, and it's a hard pill to swallow.

Back in the day when I was writing on the forums "guys, forget Firefox and use Opera, it's fast it's usable you have everything you might want in a browser with undeniable proof", the reply would eventually be "yes but Firefox has _this_ webdev extension and I can't do without it". So Firefox would get installed in their families' and friends' PCs, because that's what the web developer used. Also, the "safer faster better" marketing campaign, although that slogan would have been much more appropriate to Opera than Firefox. Fast forward a few years. Google Chrome comes out and everyone stops caring about those damn extensions; suddenly performance becomes a huge decision factor (nevermind Chrome was a resource hog compared to Opera, nevermind the horrible lack of features, nevermind the bad usability). I could go on, but you get the drift.

There's no incentive for large market share browsers to significantly improve because the (mediocrity+marketing=success) recipe is proven to work, over and over. What would it take for Chrome to lose market share? A new hot hip popular company with lots of money thrown in advertising, like (extremely unlikely example) Tesla, with a new cute interface. Because people like new and shiny trinkets.

</comment><comment><USER60> I only notice the kind of "tabs are slow to open" behavior pretty randomly, and without knowing the state of the rest of my machine at those moments (is there something else pegging a few of my cores for some reason?) I can't confidently place any blame on the browser itself.

For what they are, I consider modern web browsers to be exceptionally fast and reliable, and they tend to put a lot of other applications to absolute shame. They are imperfect, but still very, very good.

</comment><comment><USER61> I just counted my open tabs in Opera 42, and quit it so I could see the memory use.

799 open tabs. 8.5GB. Restarted in around 10 seconds and it's currently using around 2GB. "Delay loading of background tabs" is checked, which I believe is the default now.

Not had any serious responsiveness problems. The browser extension I use to give me a list of tabs on my sidebar is a little slow when opening a new window, that's about it.

</comment><comment><USER62> > Safari may take a second or two just to open a new blank tab on a 2014 iMac

Is "blank" actually blank? If you have new tabs set to show Top Sites (the default setting), there's a notable lag that doesn't occur if you set it to Empty Page. Of course, changing it is a reduction in functionality, and it's silly that loading a simple grid of screenshots is so slow. Chrome, for its part, is even slower (on my machine) to actually load the new tab page, but it loads it asynchronously with the address bar responding instantaneously, whereas Safari lags out the whole UI.

I still use Safari myself, with new tabs set to Empty Page, because I don't really care about the screenshot-grid functionality (in either browser), and Safari has better performance in other respects, as well as lower power consumption. But it irks me that the default macOS experience makes you wait to open a new tab; it's a terrible UX for something that shouldn't be hard to optimize.

</comment><comment><USER63> Fascinating and frustrating at the same time, reading people going back and forth on their browser experiences.

"I've got 450 tabs open, in any browser, ever, and I experience 0 lag - <USER2> fact, it tends to finish rendering before my eyes even focus! And I've only got 6 gigs on some old 386!"

vs

"I can't even move my mouse in FF/Chrome/Safari without massive memory spikes and random reboots!"

At least some of the reports have to be expectations - I've sat next to someone and they thought I was "moving so fast" in my browser, and I was - <USER3> the same time - cursing how slow everything was running.

Someone reporting "no lag" might actually be experiencing what someone else reports as lag. Is there any way to adjust for our vague descriptions? Videos, perhaps, of what someone considers "fast" or "no lag" on a browser with 100s of tabs open?

<comment><USER56> Doubt it.

Before the "Not me! I use w3m on a p3!" replies pile in, accept this as a generalisation warning..

I think most of us in this thread though generally use reasonably recent gear (our machines are the tools of our trade, personally I upgrade each year) and that we use our browsers extensively enough that even small issues around perf become quite noticeable...

I can't remember the last time I couldn't scroll smoothly or a tab didn't open instantly...

Maybe the difference here is those in the church of noscript and those without? After the initial pain white listing the various things you need, I've found the performance of Firefox on Linux to be brilliant. (currently around 100 tabs, some of which are sat on prime video etc, arch Linux, 16G, 50.1.0).

A lot of the extensions listed in this thread are doing quite a lot of work also, and sometimes on every request which probably doesn't help..

Disk caching could also be a problem for those of us without shiny new NVMe's in their laptops (pull the trigger on that one, it's worth it!).

The only downside of all the blocking stuff for me though is when you book a flight or something and the noscript/ublock combo prevents me from getting past the callback from your payment provider... I need some kind of giant banner that says turn off noscript and ublock when using britishairways installed somewhere :}

Or I'll just send them yet another snarky feedback message the next time I fuck it up (seriously, it calls t.co and doubleclick in serial!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Fully parallelized browser using something like Servo and Vulkan for rendering graphics is your friend.

</comment><comment><USER55> The same could be said about Computer, OS, or any Apps.

We have SSD, CPU, Memory and Network 100 to 10000x faster then what had 20 years ago, and yet Apps didn't get 100x faster. It is still not instantaneous.

In someways i think it is because we have created far too much abstraction /layers.

<comment><USER65> Some things are near instantaneous, though.

I've discontinued use of optical media circa 2009 and replaced my OS drives with SSDs in 2010.

Eliminating spin-up times and random seek times for multiple small files has probably been the biggest performance boost in my user-side computing experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Browsers need to translate instructions using a current formal spec, whilst being forgiving to human error and allowing backward compatibility with past specs / browser quirks. They also need to evolve quickly to meet future potential spec requirements.

I'm no expert in the development of browsers; but I'd hazard a guess that the problem isn't as straightforward as it seems… and performance will suffer as a result, especially since all this has to occur at runtime.

</comment><comment><USER67> As a Firefox user since v1 on Linux I have witnessed how slow some parts of the browser has become. For instance, textarea text typing can be so painfully slow with a visible lag between keystrokes.. that's not just on a certain websites and with spell-checking enabled, but with all options off on a blank page with single textarea element.. I guess there is no way to get rid of all the bloat of the ages..

</comment><comment><USER68> Not dillo. It's also space efficient. 30M for many tabs. Also No Script is embedded by a formal technique called pure js devoidness.

</comment><comment><USER69> Oh, do I miss the days of debugging problems caused by Opera's overagressive caching of _everything_. NOT.

<comment><USER26> Just Ctrl-F5 then. That overaggressive caching made it faster than other browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I tried to avoid both "real" and "fake" news sites like the plague. Firefox performs admirably.

[https://twitter.com/sinan_unur/status/801078724947046400](https://twitter.com/sinan_unur/status/801078724947046400)

</comment><comment><USER71> I know the article mentions openning new tabs.

But When it comes to clicking on links and opening a new page, Browsers aren't slow. The software that runs on them is slow: all those applications loading too many libraries, widgets, videos, video ads, Angular and lots of code that's not needed.

</comment><comment><USER72> Why for view HTML/1.0 1990 specification ([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945)) modern browser needs about:config 3000 variables for show it?

Too many modules in this "Bot Machine".

</comment><comment><USER39> I am one of the tab hoarders and I think the general attitude of browser vendors/developers towards us is "you're doing it wrong" (they might be right). FYI Having huge amount of RAM helps (a bit) and on Windows, Firefox works quite well with up to 100-200 tabs.

</comment><comment><USER73> It is not browsers. Take ay of them back to 2005 and they'll be lighting fast.

</comment><comment><USER74> Maybe the question should be "Why don't I spend time optimising browsers?"

Certainly that's my problem - I don't even try. Enough people with that attitude and browsers never get optimised...

</comment><comment><USER75> A technical question. Does using other format like XML or XHTML make rendering faster given the same amount of nodes + styles in the page? Can it help make browsers render a page faster?

<comment><USER76> No. It might make parsing faster if you optimized for it, but I don't see any reason for the choice of text representation to affect rendering speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> What happened to the performance of the 'back' button?

Pressing 'back' used to be quick, on the modern web its rather sluggish, like it re-loads the old page from scratch.

I can forgive sites that are implemented as single page with their own 'fake' URLs (though that is still annoying). But even static content.

Given the emphasis on browsers handling lots of tabs I'm surprised 'back' isn't implemented by, effectively, keeping the old page around for a bit and pausing its Javascript, then just picking up where you left off.

<comment><USER29> That's an issue with the site not having the correct caching headers. If it's static content with the correct caching headers defined then the browser should just load it from cache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Agreed, I have about 8GB of pages open right now not doing anything. Many computers don't have that much total ram. I think it's time to have per tab resource throttling. For example if a page uses over a certain amount of

. compute resources, the cpu cycles allowed in the next epoch are halved

. RAM it's memory accesses per second are halved in the next epoch

. network traffic it's kB/s are halved in the next epoch

This would allow all pages to still work but the resource intensive ones would be flagged quickly by users and developers.

<comment><USER79> And immediately any webGL visualizations / games / necessarily resource intensive webapps are rendered useless as they're automatically throttled back by the browser.

<comment><USER78> It would be pretty easy to add a conspicuous button to "unlock" resources iff they were throttled.

Being generous, I think the average user might actually push this btn once a month?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> I just don't know what this guy's complaining about. My PC is ancient and FireFox is responsive with dosens of tabs open.

</comment><comment><USER81> I wouldn't say browers are slow, it's just that sites are bloated to no end.

Then again, as is Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER82> On Android you should check Polarity browser.It's faster than any other browser.

<comment><USER83> Every time I try one of those third party browsers, it's fast but can't render many pages right. It's as if they are taking some shortcut that works only 80% of the time.

<comment><USER10> Rather than any one shortcut, they're probably implementing 20% of the W3C specs that together cover 80% of their test pages. Unsurprisingly, this is both much easier and much faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Everything seemed to get slower and slower as JavaScript became more prevalent IMO.

</comment><comment><USER85> Unimaginative, non-technical rant. Please find the bottlenecks, and provide a technical solution. The code is open source for you to read, and your patch will be constructive and helpful. Your idealist blog-post, not really that helpful.

<comment><USER86> the bottlenecks here are systemic, part of the wider "web development" mentality, rather than technical parts of browsers.

build and use sites that template html, without js / huge styling, like HN or pinboard, and I promise you everything will be lightning fast

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Yeah, Opera with Presto engine was amazing. It was the only browser that focused on UX, really fast and responsive UX. It also had real keyboard navigation, going through the links was easier, than using a mouse, temporarily enabling javascript or cookies in a tab was couple of keypresses away. Good times.

Nowadays we have monopolies forcing onto us mediocre things developed by mediocre teams, like Chromium/Blink. And they are big and so deep in the government, that no one seem to be able to do anything about it.

<comment><USER88> I just installed Opera 12.17 to verify your claims. I was very disappointed. This reminds me of people that say their old Nokia phones were better than the smartphones of today. Funny how time distorts things.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi You probably just don't appreciate the extra features Opera gives. Which, of course, is fine, but for many of us they are a dealbreaker. I'm still looking for another browser giving me real MDI with "click tab to minimize" functionality... Otter Browser kind of does but falls short in other respects. Vivaldi doesn't even try (they haven't even made the menubar native...)

By the way, if you are referring to speed rather than features, you need to take into account that when you try Opera 12.17 right now, you are trying a browser that has been frozen in time for years while the JavaScript on websites evolved. For this reason, it's now very slow (if not incompatible) in JavaScript-heavy websites like Facebook, Gmail, etc... but I can attest as a long-time user that it was indeed the fastest browser in its time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> My Firefox instance has recently picked up the nasty habit of every time I move to a different tab, the web area is white save for a spinning grey loading icon in the center for a good half second. I've never seen anything like this before recently and it's a real bummer on speed

<comment><USER8> The spinner means the UI process has switched tabs but the content process hasn't painted the tab content yet. Possibly because it's doing something else (like running script).

Is there a particular site that causes this to happen when you have it loaded? If you're willing to spend some time troubleshooting or profiling this, please let me know and I'll walk you through some ways to do that...

<comment><USER89> Sure, I'd be more than happy to try breaking this down, I'm going to try a nightly build now as other users have suggested and see how it feels

<comment><USER8> Excellent, thanks!

If you're using a nightly, you should be able to use [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Profiling_with_the_Built-in_Profiler) to profile it, because nightlies have useful symbols. Might be worth capturing a profile at the point when the spinner stops and the page is finally shown.

<comment><USER89> The issue appears to have resolved itself with a fresh install. I could not replicate the behavior in the nightly, and when I reinstalled the main release it did not manifest again either. Sorry to not be a better help, I'm trying to wrap my head around it...

<comment><USER8> All good. It's frustrating when problems come and go like this, but not much we can do about it.

If this starts happening again and you get any more data on it, please email me: bzbarsky at mit dot edu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Has the author tried [https://vivaldi.com/](https://vivaldi.com/) (started from the remnants of original opera I believe)

<comment><USER91> It's literally just Chrome, with a different chrome (UI) and some new features in the UI. You're not going to get anything faster than Chrome if it uses the same engine (Blink).

<comment><USER53> The post is not about the performance of rendering pages, it's about the UI. So recommending a browser that uses a different UI seems reasonable.

<comment><USER92> vivaldi's ui is web based and even slower than chrome's though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> network is slow, not browser

</comment><comment><USER94> Why do we still have non-centered content on a website?

</comment><comment><USER95> We got some new rocking fast www.brave.com versions out that should be wayyy fast.</comment>


Xendiz - <AUTHOR> https://xendiz.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Xendiz is an advertising platform, based on openRTB protocol, using machine learning algorithms for maximizing advertising efficiency. We have already worked with partners from more than 10 countries. Xendiz website: [https://xendiz.com/](https://xendiz.com/)</comment>


Non-hackers: how to find a co-founder - <AUTHOR> http://pashbonk.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-find-cofounder.html <comment><USER2> Let's take a different look at this article. As a thought experiment, say I'm a non-hacker, enrolled in b-school, looking for a hacker. Now the suggestions:

1\. enroll in an engineering school. oops. 2. study CS, or take relevant classes. Ok, I can take relevant classes. half-oops. 3. go to all classes to see the real hackers. Real hackers aren't going to be in "introduction to programming." oops. 4. hang out with admirable hackers. Icebreakers anyone? oops.

Your post presumes a lot of favorable conditions which do not apply to many people your article is addressed to; the problem is left unsolved. It looks like a rather gaping problem, so why not address it? A matchmaking service!

I was told of an annual entrepreneurship program in Taiwan, where small teams of all hackers and all business folks apply via separate tracks. The winners then get matched together. It's quite an intriguing concept and definitely worth exploring further.

<comment><USER3> Good points, the article was quite narrowly focused. Where would you go to find cofounders?

<comment><USER4> I'd frame it a different way:

"Stay in touch with the potential cofounders you've already found."

I met my cofounder when we lived across from each other in college at the Arts Theme House. We just didn't know we were cofounders yet. At the time, I was a physics major - my cofounder knew that I had previously worked at a tech startup, but he had no idea that I was still into computers (I'm not sure I was, at the time), or that I'd done several major side projects. I knew him as a psych major who was a bit of an electronics whiz - I had no idea that he wanted to go into entrepreneurship or the Internet space. For that matter, I don't think he did either.

I didn't find out what he was doing until I went over to catch up with him at Homecoming. I knew that he'd been at a consulting firm (via FaceBook), but usually consultants go into big business instead of Web2.0 startups. Even then, I didn't join immediately - he had someone else picked out as a technical cofounder. It was only after the previous technical cofounder quit (for visa reasons) that I joined up with him.

Also - there's a common misconception that top-notch hackers spend all their time hacking. They spend _a lot_ of time hacking, but most have other interests. For example, Guy Steele sings bass in choir and does swing dancing. Paul Graham writes essays and paints. One of the top hackers I knew at college was a CS/Theater double major. IMNSHO, these people often have _better_ technical chops than the single-minded, socially awkward computer geek.

<comment><USER3> Arts Theme House:) Go Duke! Damn good points about hackers with more than just technical chops. Congrats on finding your cofounder, I'm guessing you've already got a live startup. If you want to link it, we'd love to check it out.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it was at Amherst. There must be multiple colleges with Arts Theme Houses ;-).

And we're not live yet, but we're close. Damn day job sucks up my time. We may have something (not our main idea, but potentially useful) up by tomorrow though, and hopefully our original site idea will follow soon afterwards...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're not a hacker then you'd better be good in marketing and a good negotiator because these are the skills that most hackers lack. This way you'll complement each other, and you'll have something to offer the partnership.

<comment><USER3> For the Jobs: how could he improve his marketing/negotiating skills?

For the Woz: how could he find a Jobs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not convinced the best hackers are found in a university computer lab. When I was in college the only people in the computer lab were IRC addicts who were too broke to afford their own computer! The article mentions "the Woz" and I'm pretty sure steve jobs did not meet steve wozinak in a computer lab.

<comment><USER3> You're right, Steve met Woz because they lived in the same neighbourhood/street. I agree that labs might be a long shot. Where else do you think hackers might hang out?

<comment><USER7> Alone in their basements? Seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think the advice in the article applies anymore. Who would go to a computer lab these days? I suspect people are more likely to use labtops and WLAN.

Also, I don't think hackers dislike Java. Judging by the number of Open Source projects in Java, I'd say it is popular among volunteers, too (not only people being forced to by their superiors are using it).

I am not sure studying programming is a good idea, either. I would also like to have a co-founder who is a graphics designer, marketing is good, too, generally somebody who gets things moving.

<comment><USER3> As with menloparkbum, I agree that labs might be a long shot. I also agree that cofounders with design and marketing skills would be great to have. Where would you go to find them?

<comment><USER8> I am only just starting to look - tough question. Maybe at a cartoon fair? Conferences? Local "special interest" group meetings? LinkedIn? Craigslist? Recommendations through friends? Parties at the local arts college?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think a key point from the post is that non-hackers need to make the first move - because face it, you need them more than they need you, no matter how unfair you think that is.

<comment><USER9> I've thought about this for a bit and I really don't know who needs who more so I like to think a non-hacker needs a hacker both equally. For example, if a non-hacker can't find a hacker, he'll go hire one. Hiring one might not be the best approach but if you have the money to spend, why not? Of course it's always better to have a hacker as as cofounder. Now, a hacker - can be business savvy so he wouldn't need a non-hacker.

But lets think about this, you have a hacker who thinks he doesn't need a non- hacker. Well, most of the applications that hackers most likely build is for other hackers. When you speak to VCs, how many of them are hackers? Or a bunch of hacker guys building a 'fashion site'...uh what do guys know about fashion. In this case, I would go find a non-hacker chick to join the team b/c she'll know all the avenues and forum girls go to - marketing power.

You can build, but what you build won't always get users. I know there seems to be a view in Silicon Valley that MBAs are morons but it's wrong to lump them all into one group. I could easily say that a lot of hackers, while brilliant, may build something really 'cool' but so entirely 'useless.'

A hacker and non-hacker team is the best combination. You both need each other equally. There's no "I" in "Team."

<comment><USER4> "For example, if a non-hacker can't find a hacker, he'll go hire one."

You can't build a successful tech business with a hired hacker. By choosing to hire, you'll only be able to attract programmers who are willing to work for the money you can pay them. The cream of the crop will pass you up in favor of startups that give them equity. Your first technical person sets a ceiling on the technical ability of your subsequent hires, because bad programmers are not able to recognize great ones.

If you're right and you do find a market niche that's extremely profitable, you'll invite competition. One of those competitors will inevitably have a top-notch hacker as a cofounder, and then you'll get eaten for lunch as their small, nimble team of elite hackers copies everything you do and then innovates way beyond it.

Many companies tried this approach in the dot-com boom, with predictable results. For example, Altavista/Lycos/Infoseek got eaten by Google, Value America by Amazon, Friendster and now MySpace by FaceBook.

<comment><USER9> "MySpace by FaceBook" -- that's kind of arguable because MySpace was acquired and I really don't know who's making more money than whom. What about Digg? As for Google eating those companies you listed up..heck Google eats everyone up.

Having a hacker as a co-founder is always better than hiring which I stated. The point is, having a team of just solely hackers is not always better than having a team of a non-hacker and hacker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh my goodness. I'm truly alarmed by this article. The author needs to think more in terms innovation, and creating value (for him and his co-workers, his investors and his users) in places that people would not think to look. I don't think it's about finding a hacker who can code in Ruby and then building a me too web2.0 app/website. Web 2.0 and pastel coloured websites will come and go but good innovators will always be around whether they know how to program in the latest "geek" language or not.

<comment><USER11> I agree - it is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble. Everybody wants 'in' on the youtube billions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How about how to find a co-founder if you've sent out flyers, list-serv emails and talked to professors? :P</comment>


Elsevier Left Users' Passwords Exposed Online - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbw8b9/elsevier-user-passwords-exposed-online <comment><USER3> Everything at Elsevier is closed, locked up, and proprietary, except for (ironically) your passwords.

Also, if you want an alternative to Mendeley check out my app Polar: [https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

<comment> phoe-krk Passwords aren't monetizable, that's why.

...or are they?

<comment><USER4> I would imagine the statistics of a large user base would significant in the black market. Most commonly used ones etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Throaway

I interviewed at Elsevier for their Director of Information Security. The current Director was going back to Comcast, the entire team was from Comcast.

They were pompous, egotistical, and utterly clueless. They asked the all time dumbest questions I've ever been asked in an interview.

The first interview of the day was with the outgoing Director and his two lieutenants. They spent most of the hour explaining how important it is to make the business happy. When I tried to ask questions about their control framework they changed the subject. They deflected every question I asked. I thought about just leaving after the first interview but I stuck it out for the next 3 1 hour interviews.

It took them 6 months to follow up and tell me that they position was filled by an internal candidate

</comment><comment><USER6> Add it to the list of reasons to be unhappy with Elsevier. The article makes it sound like passwords are stored in plain text. What a disaster of a company.

<comment><USER7> Almost all Elsevier development and infrastructure work is farmed out to companies in India, so they're probably not directly responsible for the cock- up, but their general attitude towards development, and their customers, probably plays a role.

<comment> munk-a If you cut corners in management then you are directly responsible for the cock-up, period.

This is a modern issue with the way laws look at subcontracting work as a tool that allows companies to isolate themselves from liability which needs to change, if your company (Elsevier) sub-contracts it should be your company on the line - with an allowance to pursue legal action against the sub- contractors that will be examined in depth during that proceeding.

These sorts of situations have too often resolved in "Well, we can't tell if it was the parent or sub-contractor that was responsible, I guess we need to let them both off." instead hit the parent with the full force of the law as a negligent reseller and if they were unaware of these situations they can recoup their costs by pursuing the subcontractor on their own dime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They publish an interesting book which they could read for fun and profit.

[[https://www.elsevier.com/books/data-breach-preparation- and-r...](https://www.elsevier.com/books/data-breach-preparation-and- response/fowler/978-0-12-803451-4\]\(https://www.elsevier.com/books/data- breach-preparation-and-response/fowler/978-0-12-803451-4\))

 _^v^_

</comment><comment><USER9> For the record: [https://twitter.com/michaelhoffman/status/102937490375625113...](https://twitter.com/michaelhoffman/status/1029374903756251136)

</comment><comment><USER10> So, right now, most university Elsevier customers use "IP address authentication" to get through the paywall. And have a byzantine "proxy" system for affiliates not on campus to still get access -- appearing to a vendor like Elsevier like they are coming from a recognized university IP.

There are a whole bunch of problems with this system, that you can imagine.

But ONE is that it makes it a lot easier for things like sci-hub to automatically batch ingest articles with credentials from someone affiliated with a university (Elsevier customer), but without Elsevier actually knowing _what_ account was used. Elsevier's access logs end up giving them nothing but at best a university-affiliated IP address, with easy no way to know (because of proxy use) even what downloads were associated with distinct "users".

For THAT reason, academic content vendors have been trying to move to a system where there are individual identity accounts, so they can track who is downloading what (and try to block or worse accounts being used to sci-hub). You know, for "security".

I think this incident shows that trusting Elsevier with any kind of identity accounts is not in fact "security".

<comment> munk-a There is no part of this (except the possibility of shutting it down) that I don't love. Elsevier is just such a wonderful company to detest, they're like the final boss of free-market driven anti-intellectualism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And all the higher ups leave the company out of disgust for their destructive impact in the world, when? About now? How about now? Is now a good time?

<comment><USER12> Leave the company because some engineer wrote log.Printf("%v", req) at the top of some handler function?

<comment><USER13> what were other developers (code reviews), testers and security officers doing? Stop blaming it all on one guy.

<comment><USER12> Oh, I didn't intend to do that. I just said that it seems irrational to me for the execs to leave their company because the engineering practices are not perfect. Fix the practices, keep on going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not that these days exposing hashed passwords is always that much better... but why are they even keeping plaintext passwords to accidentally expose?

<comment> munk-a As these appeared to originate from a log file it's very possibly plaintext passwords are not being stored anywhere (except the leak spot which is bad) but instead are being logged out of memory where they (generally) need to exist in plaintext for a bit for verification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think this is a mis-configured server - this is expected behavior for elastic search, as the OSS version has no security baked in to it - <USER2> security at all is an enterprise feature. This is irresponsible from elastic.co.

<comment><USER15> No. Plain text user passwords should never, in any circumstances, be entered into a search engine (which is what elasticsearch is). There is simply no possible excuse for this. There is no way this is elastic.co's fault, this is entirely on Elsevier.

<comment><USER14> I agree that the passwords should not be logged in any circumstances (if I had to guess, I might suspect that disk log files were ingested straight to elasticsearch), but I don't think this invalidates my argument that elasticsearch out of the box is not suitable for any data you intend to not share with the world.

<comment> munk-a There is a separate thread about security best practice learning that touches on the question of if the rote security knowledge we pass on is making it more likely that someone logs a password. I think a discussion around logging habits is much more relevant and while elasticsearch may have _also_ been misconfigured, pumping passwords into an internally viewable log file is a bad idea even if that file is well secured.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Targeted neurotechnology restores walking in humans with spinal cord injury - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0649-2 <comment><AUTHOR> Amazing: [https://youtu.be/0tov6Eiok1o](https://youtu.be/0tov6Eiok1o)</comment>


How to Sign and Release to the Central Repository with GitHub Actions - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/sualeh/how-to-sign-and-release-to-the-central-repository-with-github-actions-9k6 <comment><USER2> I worked through this on a couple projects last month if anyone needs more examples or has questions.</comment>


Google Fined Rs. 136 Crore for 'Search Bias' by Competition Commission - <AUTHOR> https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/google-fined-rs-136-crore-for-unfair-business-practices-by-competition-commission-1810375 <comment><AUTHOR> For those not familiar with Indian currency, the fine is approximately 21 million in USD.

<comment><USER2> That doesn't even move the needle for Google. I am sure they used some sort of formula to determine this fine based on their laws, but an international corporation might bother to fight it on merit for PR purposes, but really won't care about the fine or change their behavior because of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious to know the evidence found against them - this article literally gives no details beyond the headline.

<comment><AUTHOR> Economic Times has a bit more detail: [https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/cci- issue...](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/cci-issues-order- against-google-for-search-bias/articleshow/62838992.cms)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Harmogram, Web Audio API + Canvas (Paper.js) FFT/Harmonograph - <AUTHOR> http://harmogram.com

<comment><USER2>
      Fuck!
      Sorry but this experiment works only on Google Chrome.

Fuck indeed.

<comment><USER3> I feel Chrome is going to become the next IE6. And that sucks.

Then again is it Chrome's fault that Firefox and Opera don't catch up? Would love any insight on this.

<comment> at-fates-hands I'm pretty sure Chrome still hasn't fixed the cleartype feature so embedded fonts look decent like they do in Firefox.

Chrome really isn't that far ahead of FF or Opera. all three are still pretty close. The only real loser here is still IE. Their paltry developer tools and IE8's incompatibility with HTML5 has pretty much doomed it to the trash bin.

Just in case you needed some benchmark facts:

[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/the-big-browser- benchmark...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/the-big-browser-benchmark- chrome-18-vs-opera-11-vs-firefox-11-vs-ie9-vs-safari-5/19418)

<comment><USER4> Chrome has Web Audio, which is pretty far from coming to Firefox, and seems low priority[1]. That's why we keep seeing cool audio stuff posted here that's Chrome-exclusive. Firefox supports its own Audio Data API[2] which predates the W3C standard, but it's deprecated, and will never be supported by other browsers.

Web Intents[3] is another cool feature in Chrome that's not even on the map for Firefox. Instead there's a "counter-proposal" called Web Activities[4] that no one outside of Mozilla is talking about (and it seems pretty dead).

I still use Firefox, but the lack of leadership in these two cases is discouraging.

[1] <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=779297>

[2] <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API>

[3] <http://webintents.org/>

[4] <https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebActivities>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool. Only thing that confused me is the UI seems to have a mind of its own sometimes - songs suddenly change themselves, and the list scrolls, and I can't find my way back to where I was.

</comment><comment><USER6> God, this is so much cooler than my holiday project :). Nice work.

In terms of critique, if you're interested in that, the UI could use some work (the interactions are weird, and it's not very intuitive), but once you get past that, the visualization is awesome. The UI is also quite pretty, so I think if you fine-tuned the interaction issues, it would be fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice work! Any plans on updating the Github repo <https://github.com/adrianleb/harmogram> with this version?

Reason I ask, I wouldn't mind contributing a feature where the user can select their own microphone input as the audio source and have the paper.js visualisation react accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER4> No sound in Chromium on Linux (Ubuntu). Unfortunately, that often happens when I click on these experiments, due to lack of MP3 support. There is MP3.js to get around the patent issues, if Linux support is important to you: <https://github.com/devongovett/mp3.js>

<comment><USER8> it works for me: Chromium Version 22.0.1229.94 Ubuntu 12.10 (161065)

<comment><USER4> Weird. That's the exact same version string in mine and I get nothing. Did you install some kind of MP3 plugin/codec to get it to work?

<comment><USER8> I didn't install anything specifically for this site but looking through my installed packages I now recall I had previously installed e.g.:

browser-plugin-vlc

chromuim-codecs-ffmpeg-extra

gecko-mediaplayer

<comment><USER4> chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra did it. Thanks! Weird that no corresponding package seems to exist for Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really nice work. Discovered some nice music, too :)

When it's on-screen is uses two whole CPUs though (one for the chrome tab, and one for Chrome's GPU-driving process) and the visualization is obviously half a beat ahead of the music. That's not your fault, but it certainly demonstrates the drawbacks of the platform.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool cool. Needs a pause button bad... or is there one already?

<comment><USER11> spacebar da pause

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hate stuff that auto play music full volume on opening the page. That said, looks like an interesting experiment. I'm glad that people are using the Web Audio API, hopefully the more people use it the more browsers will support it and it will be updated.

</comment><comment><USER13> Collection of Web Audio experiments: [http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/sampl...](http://chromium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/audio/samples.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Not OPs fault, but from the name I was expecting a web-based harmonica. Anything good online for doing GarageBand type things? Preferably that can be used in other projects?

</comment><comment><USER15> More awesome web stuff today. Great job and awesome music!

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting, I did something similar with <http://puur.tk/better>

</comment><comment><USER17> why is it chrome only?

<comment><USER5> the web audio API isn't implemented in anything else. Firefox uses a proprietary thing that's been deprecated.

<comment><USER16> the web audio api seems to function well in Safari

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very nice! It was a little 'glitchy' whilst loading but otherwise worked fine for me (Win 7/Chrome 23).

</comment><comment><USER19> Hah, nice UK bass selection! Didn't know about Damu – awesome stuff.

</comment><comment><USER20> nice! looks legit - great music choices too :D

<comment><USER21> It uses the <http://shuffler.fm> API. It's the blogs that pick the music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Love it! What's the objective of the project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Objective was mainly to experiment with the Web Audio API, specially its analyser. Once you plug that into a 2d/3d canvas theres really a lot of room for creativity. Glad you liked it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ha! Nobody there I ever heard of.

<comment><USER11> Avicci, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> beautiful!</comment>


A Life of Its Own (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/28/a-life-of-its-own

<comment><USER2> Have major advances been made in the 5 years since this article?></comment>


Our Firebase and Google Cloud project was suspended over suspicious activity - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@amton15127/why-you-should-not-use-firebase-and-google-cloud-c05fe6ccdbe8 <comment><USER2> The only time I ever got an email from a real human at google was when I tried out google cloud for a weekend when it first came out. I had a detailed plan to benchmark different instance types and compare them to AWS for an upcoming project.

I got about two hours into this and my account was deactivated, one of the cloud engineers sent me a truly nasty email saying that bitcoin mining is not allowed on google cloud and I should stop abusing resources and being so irresponsible. I replied and asked how on earth they came to the conclusion I was a bitcoin miner and explained what I was actually doing, but never heard back from them again.

It was so bizarre, I felt like I was back in the 3rd grade getting in trouble for knowing more about the Apples than the computer teacher.

<comment><USER3> > I got about two hours into this and my account was deactivated, one of the > cloud engineers sent me a truly nasty email saying that bitcoin mining is > not allowed on google cloud and I should stop abusing resources and being so > irresponsible.

This is a pretty big claim. It would be grossly inappropriate if true. Do you have any evidence to back it up?

<comment><USER4> I can say that crypto mining is prohibited during the free trial (and there are heuristics to detect it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc. We use AWS instead who has so far been very good at the support side.

<comment><USER6> Yes exactly this. They ban you and shame you as if you are 5 year old. This is why we don't rely on Google either and are using less and less of their services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I suspect there's more going on here than meets the eye:

\- This is the first post on a new blog by somebody without a full name or any social media presence that I can find (googling "amton gaming blockchain" returns zero hits)

\- The company/site in question is never named or linked to

\- They used somebody else's credit card and don't seem to have matching ID for it

Is "blockchain gaming" code for an online casino or something? If so, this is likely against GCP terms of service.

<comment><USER8> You are completely guessing this based on very little information. There is a strong chance that you are wrong. Is your goal just to throw mud?

You ignore the point of the post - that Google can and will shut some clients down with little warning and even less recourse.

<comment><USER7> Do you disagree with any of the points I've raised?

I know it's a common trope here that Google does evil things just for fun, but we've only got one side of the story here and there's been a number of previous cases here of apps getting kicked out for what turned out to be pretty understandable reasons.

<comment><USER8> No one said Google did this for fun. Google appears to prioritize automated systems and bottom line over care for it's customers.

And whether any of your analysis about the customer is accurate is irrelevant and not worth debate here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > They have full control of your project.

Correction, you _gave_ them full control of your project, when you decided to use their APIs and tooling as the literal backbone of your application.

This is the tradeoff, and server administration is not something you can hack at, DevOps style. Proper external backups would've at least made switching away less painful.

If you wish to have full control of your data, you have to co-locate your own servers and run things on bare metal. Though running things on the cloud is a trade-off that many of us have made.

<comment><USER8> Nobody expects to be on the bad end of this situation, and the good side (all the services and features) are very tempting.

Terms of service and other agreements do not justify the careless approach that Google takes toward it's customers and customer service.

This situation should be resolved with capable humans in the Google business/account management group, but as we have seen so many times here on HN, that is not how Google operates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >>We have some backup files, but it doesn't enough, we've never planned to have an automatic backup on Google Cloud because we've never thought about this situation is occurring today

Many companies are going to have learn this lesson the hard way, time after time see stories of companies under the impression that cloud == no need for backups.. its the cloud why would you need to back things up

This way of thinking will burn many many companies, even worse when you use a SaaS product that has no ability to export data so you are locked in... those companies are screwed

</comment><comment><USER11> Isn't this the price of doing business?

I'm not being facetious, but ops people have always decried giving up control of the platform and especially buying into lock-in to services that only exist in a particular cloud.

If there's no corollary to firebase, and your app is built entirely on firebase, and they increase the price or change direction, you gotta go with it. I mean it's the definition of vendor lock-in; and it applies too when the political whims of the company change. IE; if you're making games and you're hosted on Azure, you have to have some level of knowledge that Microsoft makes games too, and that they could potentially subtly harm you if you're outcompeting them.

Everyone knows that you "buy" time, you "buy" less burden of operation and you "buy" the fact that you're living at a higher abstraction and can move more rapidly; this is baked in to the extra cost of hosting with a cloud provider.

Maybe people don't really know (or grok) that you also "sell" not only your competence, but your self reliance?

<comment><USER8> People go this route because they do not understand the potential consequences.

If it were published up front that x% of Google customers will get locked out and lose their business, I think you would see a lot fewer of these stories because Google would get a lot less business.

People just are ignorant of the true risks here.

<comment><USER12> I think you are right. At least to a large degree. I will never do business with cloud providers like these, but I know enough people who did and got burned. The pattern and results are usually very similar.

While involving a different cloud provider, I recently read a long thread from a Amazon (re)seller that got his/her funds frozen. There was a lot of indignation, about how Amazon could treat him/her this way, while he/she was making more than a million dollar each month. Personally, I think that the level of arrogance, self-entitlement and hubris (not just of this seller, but also the fellow sellers chiming in) was the most remarkable about it all. Obviously very opportunistic, but suddenly full of moral judgment when "screwed over" by Amazon. I'm not so sure it's just ignorance of the true risks.

The classic tale of "the scorpion and the frog" always comes to mind, when I read stories like these.

/m2c

<comment><USER13> I have no personal experience on the Amazon retail side, but have you noticed you never here about this poor customer support from AWS or for that matter Azure?

As far as even how Amazon treats third party sellers, I'm not saying it's an excuse, but the seller isn't the ultimate customer - the buyer is. Amazon is very focused on good customer service for the buyer.

Google's customer support is horrible.

<comment><USER11> Unless you're in an enterprise agreement (which I am), then GCP support is above and beyond- even in one case identifying exactly where some open source code broke and submitting an upstream patch for my specific use-case.

<comment><USER13> In contrast, you don't need an "enterprise agreement" to get great support from AWS. The business level agreement that is $100 a month minimum or 10% of your spend is excellent and affordable for small companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This does make me think again that we should completely move off Firebase (still using auth & storage).

<comment><USER8> It's not just about firebase, it's about Google services in general. We have heard so many of these calls for help on HN that it is clear that relying on Google services is like gambling with your business.

<comment><USER15> Confirmation bias. GCP has millions of customers, these are very rare instances and we only ever hear one side of the story. It's not reasonable to make a business decision based on such anecdotes.

Any other provider suspends accounts too - everyone has the same kind of abuse problem.

<comment><USER13> Why are the stories overwhelmingly about GCP even though it has much less marketshare than AWS/Azure?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why are people persisting to Firebase? Is is it still solving a pain point?

<comment><USER17> Mobile sync, if I understand correctly.

<comment><USER18> There's no open source equivalent?

Lock-in could be the reason they're still using it.

<comment><USER17> The closest I can think of that I've used is CouchDB..

But it's not a turnkey solution, particularly with how ACL works (read granularity is at the database level)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Check out GunDB as a replacement for Firebase.</comment>


Spain about to bring in basic income scheme, could 'stay forever' - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/spain-to-approve-basic-income-scheme-response-coroanvirus-outbreak-2020-5 <comment><USER2> This will create thousands of administrative jobs, which supports one of the goals of the EU: full employment through pointless paperwork!

This is not UBI, it's means tested and adjusted.

</comment><comment><USER3> Increasingly taxing work to subsidize non work has limits.</comment>


Show HN: Wallabag, a self-hostable application for saving web pages - <AUTHOR> https://www.wallabag.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there,

As written in the title, wallabag is a self-hosted read-it-later web application (like Pocket or Instapaper, but open-source) that saves content from webpages. You can organize content and sync it on different devices. We were kindly invited ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904805](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904805)) by HN to do a Show HN, and hope you'll be interested in our project.

For the last few months, we've been working on a whole new version of our application (v2), and it sound very promising. We've just launched a new alpha version for you to test on your server : [https://www.wallabag.org/blog/2016/01/22/wallabag- alpha2-v2](https://www.wallabag.org/blog/2016/01/22/wallabag-alpha2-v2). You can also have a preview at [http://v2.wallabag.org/](http://v2.wallabag.org/)

If you're not willing to play adventurous, you can still give a try to old version 1.9.1 or choose our hosting service at [https://framabag.org/](https://framabag.org/)

<comment><USER2> Hi, and thank you for Wallabag! I've been happily using the self-hosted version for quite a while now. At some point I forked[1] the Android app but development stalled when I needed an API to be able to improve the app further. So this v2 is great news!

Just an FYI: in the blog post you mention that the login for the preview of v2 is wallabag/wallabag, however I get 'bad credentials' when trying that.

This new Material Design version looks awesome! Eagerly looking forward to v2 becoming stable so I can upgrade.

[1]: [https://github.com/monkeyinmysoup/wallabag- android](https://github.com/monkeyinmysoup/wallabag-android)

<comment><USER3> wow nice your fork! Did you see that we released a new android version few months ago?

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I didn't know that, but I'll check it out. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Btw, sovereign[1] project has wallabag included in the package.

1) [https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign](https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign)

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks really cool, I'd love to see this on Sandstorm at some point. (I use TTRSS as a feed reader there, and tend to just star stuff to come back to, though this would be a better place for storing the stuff I want to read later.)

<comment><USER3> Hello ocdtrekkie, We don't have time to develop a sandstorm application. If you want to help us with this app, you're welcome ;-) I open a new issue to not forget your idea. Already here in fact [https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/issues/1160](https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/issues/1160)

<comment><USER5> Heh, awesome to see people have already been talking about it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have you considered adding an option for saving/archiving the pages without cleaning them? Maybe utilize WARC somehow.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not the same thing, but kind of relevant and interesting, gwern article on the dangers of link rot and archiving URLs: [http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs](http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs)

</comment><comment><USER8> Just tried the V2 demo, and it looks great, with both themes. I used V1 a year or so ago, and this is definitely a step up.

However, since Firefox added reader view, I find I don't use services like this any longer. I was a very longtime Instapaper user and then also used Readability.com, but now I just bookmark pages I like (and/or save them to Android Firefox's reading list).

<comment><USER3> I understand. It depends on your organization. Firefox reader view (who works very well) is not a read it later. It's a cleaner tool ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, how does work with DMCA issues? (Or am I missing something?)

<comment><USER10> In regards to self-hosting, there shouldn't be any copyright infringement as long as you are not re-serving the contents. Even then, there are exceptions, e.g. archive.org and Google Cache.

The biggest likely legal concern is possible accidental server DDOS, but as long as it respects robots.txt and it paces itself, that shouldn't happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice work! I'd like to see someone create an automatically reformat & send to Kindle app.

<comment><USER12> Check out tinderizer:

[http://tinderizer.com](http://tinderizer.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like it, but the install have quite a lot of dependencies which was kind of annoying.

</comment><comment><USER14> OK I think I'll go download that framabag.org thing instead, that sounds cool

</comment><comment><USER15> Warc support would rule

</comment><comment><USER16> Are there any plans to support video offline sync?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ideas, but no real solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> stable version demo [http://demo.wallabag.org/](http://demo.wallabag.org/) is 404

<comment><USER3> Yes, sorry for that. Don't hesitate to create an account on Framabag.org (it's free!) to test stable version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> nice!</comment>


Apple reportedly purchasing Dre Beats for 3.2 billion - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/search?q=beats%20apple

<comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717961](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717961)

Other submissions, some have up-votes, some have comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717995)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7717980)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7718106)</comment>