I’m currently testing just outright blocking all scripts through uBO, and to be honest it is not usable. I will use it for a little longer, then for sure disable it. A lot of websites just refuse to load (thanks, SPAs), and those that do often have little interactions that break, thus making the pages hard to use or even outright unusable.
To give some examples for those that haven’t tried this: images may refuse to load (js based lazy load implementation), dropdown menus almost never work, search option usually doesn’t work (and if it does it’s only because it goes to a different page, which is fair), comments probably won’t show up, pretty much anything “live” won’t work. Oh and let’s not forget the captchas and all the proof-of-work blockers.
For me the only really interesting part about this experience is that imgur refuses to load, even if you have a direct link to an image.
The company I worked for used to use SSR which was fine but the web scraping was relentless and the “free” thing we offered was relatively computationally expensive. Eventually we moved to SPA and bought into the CloudFlare protection racket. This didn’t stop it of course but it made the low effort scrapers have to use a browser and hopefully bumped their costs us The advent of the LLM crawlers has made everything worse as well.
We got a bunch of complaints when we moved to the JS only site saying we were ruining the Internet and while I didn’t disagree the practicalities make it a requirement.
We got a bunch of complaints when we moved to the JS only site saying we were ruining the Internet
From my perspective, sites which move to javascript-only cease to be publicly accessible and essentially remove themselves from the internet. I do understand the necessity to do something about the scrapers, but going javascript-only is basically death of the site.
To give some examples for those that haven’t tried this: images may refuse to load (js based lazy load implementation), dropdown menus almost never work, search option usually doesn’t work (and if it does it’s only because it goes to a different page, which is fair), comments probably won’t show up, pretty much anything “live” won’t work.
All of those things work perfectly on non-broken sites like mbin instances. As far as captchas, I refuse to do them, as I don’t consent to being used like that.
For me the only really interesting part about this experience is that imgur refuses to load, even if you have a direct link to an image.
I’m currently testing just outright blocking all scripts through uBO, and to be honest it is not usable. I will use it for a little longer, then for sure disable it. A lot of websites just refuse to load (thanks, SPAs), and those that do often have little interactions that break, thus making the pages hard to use or even outright unusable.
To give some examples for those that haven’t tried this: images may refuse to load (js based lazy load implementation), dropdown menus almost never work, search option usually doesn’t work (and if it does it’s only because it goes to a different page, which is fair), comments probably won’t show up, pretty much anything “live” won’t work. Oh and let’s not forget the captchas and all the proof-of-work blockers.
For me the only really interesting part about this experience is that imgur refuses to load, even if you have a direct link to an image.
The company I worked for used to use SSR which was fine but the web scraping was relentless and the “free” thing we offered was relatively computationally expensive. Eventually we moved to SPA and bought into the CloudFlare protection racket. This didn’t stop it of course but it made the low effort scrapers have to use a browser and hopefully bumped their costs us The advent of the LLM crawlers has made everything worse as well.
We got a bunch of complaints when we moved to the JS only site saying we were ruining the Internet and while I didn’t disagree the practicalities make it a requirement.
From my perspective, sites which move to javascript-only cease to be publicly accessible and essentially remove themselves from the internet. I do understand the necessity to do something about the scrapers, but going javascript-only is basically death of the site.
All of those things work perfectly on non-broken sites like mbin instances. As far as captchas, I refuse to do them, as I don’t consent to being used like that.
imgur.com/something->farside.link/rimgo/somethingNot all of the rimgo instances work, but some do.
Edit: Well apparently farside has been shut down.