Tool Shed 3

Systems administrators can be caught up in senseless prejudice, at least as bad as the rest of us. There was a time when hackers used Lynx and other text-only browsers as a major tool for cracking websites and servers. It’s been at least two decades since that changed. These days such use is exceedingly rare. For the most part, Lynx is now used more by blind or sight-impaired surfers. But the prejudice hangs on and we have a whole generation of sysadmins who believe it’s a good idea to block disabled users. Of course, these younger guys think they are demigods and never listen to the facts.
More and more I’m forced to stop using non-graphical browsers, or avoid the growing number of sites administered by these jerks.
You can write me off as an information purist who refuses to participate in the ad-supported Internet and it would be partly true. I also suffer a bit from Adult ADD — whatever that really is — to the point that, if I have to put up with all the graphical sewage, I might as well not even be on the Net. There are other ways to handle this.
For most of my surfing, I use Firefox with all images blocked. It’s in the options; just un-check the box marked “load images automatically” and you won’t see any. I also turn off all the options for JavaScript without blocking the thing itself. For now, I don’t need anything more drastic, because too many sites use it for basic rendering. Turn JavaScript off and something like 10-15% of all sites offer no content. And it’s growing. Otherwise, I rely on Ghostery and Adblock Plus (and Flashblock) to keep the noise down. Again, you can download them automatically by looking in the menu under “Tools > Addons”. Just click the “get more addons” option and use the search function for them.
I use Chromium (the open source version behind Google Chrome) for sites which simply cannot be used without graphics, like Facebook, Wired, etc. I also run it with Ghostery and Adblock Plus, obtained pretty much the same way as with Firefox. Stuff like FlashPlayer can be controlled by checking the advanced options to load on demand, not automatically. However, because of Facebook’s ubiquitous and deceitful tracking practices, I create a second profile in the browser and use that only for Facebook. I never chase links in that profile. It is Facebook only, and it has none of the blockers installed.
I still use Opera for email and chasing links that come in my email. While it offers far more fine-grained controls built into the browser, it also tends to screw up DNS queries randomly on Linux. I’m not sure what it is, but at odd times it can’t seem to find certain sites, but those sites load very quickly in some other browser. I’m wondering how things will change when Opera switches over to Webkit for their core rendering. Webkit is notoriously anti-user, favoring the big advertisers by refusing to implement features that users want that might block the more egregious tracking practices. All those protections have to be implemented on top of the Webkit engine, and they don’t make it easy.
Yeah, all browsers suck. Most sysadmins suck, too.