Why is browsing on PPC less than stellar in 2016?

[rawweb]

What is the technical reason the browsing experience on PPC is less than stellar in 2016?

I've got a 2.5 Quad with 8gb of ram. Generally, the computer is quite responsive to apps built in her era. To me, the general concept of the internet seems pretty simple. Code on a server, browser renders code. So, what gives? Love the concept of TenFourFox, but perhaps I've become 'spoiled' and generally want things delivered quicker and not 'sloth like' when I scroll. Webpages themselves, even MacRumors, seem like they should be much snappier. To my web design eye, the site itself seems quite basic. Surfing the net on my 1.67 PBG4 is even more daunting, almost unusable.

Thanks ahead! Just want to get a sharp understanding!

 

[Orizence]

I feel like it has to do alot with the amount of javascript and images on a page, websites are not as simple as they used to be. It looks simple but there is more that goes on behind the scenes of a webpage than just the appearance. Its really a shame

 

[eyoungren]

^^^This.

As computers got more powerful web page design got less optimized. Easy to power through all the garbage when you're running 4, 6 and 8 core processors with 16GB+ of ram.

Not so much on PowerPC machines.

There are solutions though, or at least mitigations. Click on the link in my signature that mentions TenFourFox.

 

[2984839]

Most websites are unadulterated crap and web developers don't even know it, much less care.

A really, really good read whether you know a lot about web development or none at all: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1403_02-08_mickens.pdf

A modern Web page is a catastrophe. It’s like a scene from one of those apocalyptic medieval paintings that depicts what would happen if Galactus arrived: people are tumbling into fiery crevasses and lamenting various lamentable things and hanging from playground equipment that would not pass OSHA safety checks.

 

[for this]

Images have always been a problem since PPC era but we still managed to get decent internet experiences back then.
Images are bulky yes but they don't need much CPU crunching. They are not the main culprit.

I think the main culprits are not only laziness (lacking of code optimization) but also those analytic scripts
working in the background to gather users' activity and interactivity plug-ins.

 

[eyoungren]

I think the main culprits are not only laziness (lacking of code optimization) but also those analytic scripts working in the background to gather users' activity and interactivity plug-ins.

I would say it's one of the major culprits.

It contributes quite a bit to the slowdown of things. In fact, it's analytics that first caused me to notice things were not right. And that's what triggered my continuing journey to optimize Firefox/TenFourFox.

Analytics are essentially javascripts sending information about you and your system back to the collecting site. As such they impede performance. This is why I use things like uMatrix, BluHell Firewall and anti-tracking headers (websites get nothing about you when you suddenly appear as if you just came in from their home page and not a Google search or somewhere else).

 

[Hack5190]

The below screen capture shows the 'add ons' currently running in TenFoxFour. The mix is intended to block tracking and increase performance. (Less Xmarks and FoxyProxy - they serve other purposes )

 

[eyoungren]

The below screen capture shows the 'add ons' currently running in TenFoxFour. The mix is intended to block tracking and increase performance. (Less Xmarks and FoxyProxy - they serve other purposes )

View attachment 611887

I use uMatrix.

It could eliminate four addons for you (Disconnect, NO Google Analytics, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin).

It does all those things and is what eliminated NoScript and Request Policy for me (plus a couple others).

 

[Hack5190]

I use uMatrix.

It could eliminate four addons for you (Disconnect, NO Google Analytics, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin).

It does all those things and is what eliminated NoScript and Request Policy for me (plus a couple others).

I'll try it, thanks.

 

[rawweb]

^^^This.

As computers got more powerful web page design got less optimized. Easy to power through all the garbage when you're running 4, 6 and 8 core processors with 16GB+ of ram.

Not so much on PowerPC machines.

There are solutions though, or at least mitigations. Click on the link in my signature that mentions TenFourFox.

It's absolutely astonishing the difference your modifications have made! I was skeptical but have seen the light! Thanks!

 

[eyoungren]

It's absolutely astonishing the difference your modifications have made! I was skeptical but have seen the light! Thanks!

You're very welcome. Lots of frustrating Google searches over the course of several years led to that. And I still search because things are always changing.

PS. If you are still having some slowness issues with MacRumors, in your personal settings turn off the Rich Text Editor.

What's happening here is that the Quick Reply box at the bottom of each thread is always "hot". Enabling the rich text editor calls javascript for all the little buttons and everything else that makes posts easy to format. So, those javascript calls never stop as long as the editor is on.

Turn it off and that kills the javascript for that function. The downside is learning to format your posts with codes, but it's a small price to pay I think.

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

I would say it's one of the major culprits.

It contributes quite a bit to the slowdown of things. In fact, it's analytics that first caused me to notice things were not right. And that's what triggered my continuing journey to optimize Firefox/TenFourFox.

Analytics are essentially javascripts sending information about you and your system back to the collecting site. As such they impede performance. This is why I use things like uMatrix, BluHell Firewall and anti-tracking headers (websites get nothing about you when you suddenly appear as if you just came in from their home page and not a Google search or somewhere else).

Yes, it's me again. I was snooping around the PPC forums (during my free time/lunch at school), and I just HAD to reply to this. (As I said, I - once in a while - check out the latest thread on the PPC forums, but I normally choose not to post anymore.) This, however, demanded my attention and contribution. I simply HATE the Web and how it's masked as being light-weight, just because an Intel machine can drive it. I hate lazy Web developers for using inefficient code and Flash, I had Java for existing, and I hate the unnecessary amounts of eye-candy associated with almost every modern website. If I had my ways, every one of my favorite websites would look like they were created with a Word 2000 template. Who gives a crap if my website looks good?? I want it to be fast! I don't want to have to throw out the computer that I paid for - simply to cater to Webpages that become heavier and heavier each freaking year. We need government regulations on the progression of the Web and general Web development: It's shortening the lifespan of hardware, which is both environmentally unfriendly (since most people upgrade more frequently than they should), and extremely frustrating to those who don't want to shell out $1000+ for a Tim Cook Mac.

If I had nothing going for me in life, I would devote my life to advocating for this B.S. to stop. Few know it's going on because they can drive the Web okay on their Intel machines.

Hopefully this will actually mark my last post (because, as of now, my leaving just a few weeks ago was a false alarm, considering I just had to jump in here and rant). I'm gonna make an exception here, as I just had to comment on the idiotic Web. I hate Google the most, because they push new Web standards constantly and make their UIs LOOK simple. That's perhaps the worst thing: When a Web dev or UI designer makes their stuff LOOK light-weight, while more elaborate-looking Web design from back in the day looked heavy but WAS light.

 

[Dronecatcher]

If I had nothing going for me in life, I would devote my life to advocating for this B.S. to stop. Few know it's going on because they can drive the Web okay on their Intel machines.

Good for you
However, you're up against it...the problem is fine tuned and targeted consumerism - there's so much profit to be made out of enforced obsolescence, to change it now requires an entire paradigm shift...maybe the next generation can do it

 

[Gamer9430]

PS. If you are still having some slowness issues with MacRumors, in your personal settings turn off the Rich Text Editor.

What's happening here is that the Quick Reply box at the bottom of each thread is always "hot". Enabling the rich text editor calls javascript for all the little buttons and everything else that makes posts easy to format. So, those javascript calls never stop as long as the editor is on.

Turn it off and that kills the javascript for that function. The downside is learning to format your posts with codes, but it's a small price to pay I think.

RTF is hit or miss for my PPC machines. Sometimes I have absolutely no issues typing into the RTF box, other times I have to wait 5 seconds for a letter to come up. Disabling RTF always fixes it though.

 

[headsh0t95]

It amazes me that PowerPC struggles so badly on the web while even the cheapest smartphones - with much weaker processors and also 1-2 gb ram - flick through the web like its nothing...

 

[eyoungren]

It amazes me that PowerPC struggles so badly on the web while even the cheapest smartphones - with much weaker processors and also 1-2 gb ram - flick through the web like its nothing...

Smartphones are being served a mobile version of the website. It's far more optimized for it.

If you have a browser on your phone that can show you web pages as a computer then try that and see what happens. Things will still load fairly well because smartphones do have faster processors (and more than one core nowadays) but it won't be as smooth or error free.

If you use a browser on a PowerPC Mac that can change the user agent and you set it to that of a smartphone then you will get mobile pages on your Mac - served much faster of course.

This is the concept behind Classila, which is Firefox for OS9.

 

[tevion5]

I am a computer science student and have studied web design as part of my course. I am also a passionate PPC enthusiast and very proud G5 Quad owner.

Much like the decline of C in favour of Java among general software developers over the past 20 years, as hardware has become much more capable, higher level and less optimised languages and lazier data structures and algorithms have become more popular. This is because it is deemed not cost effective to spend the extra time and effort optimising your software for a user base that is very very small. For example, games like Ultima for my Apple II Plus were released (at main retail, I know Lord British made it originally in BASIC but that was slow as hell) programmed in Asdembly language. This is an incredibly low level language and is absolutely painstaking to write even simple functions in I can tell you from personal experience. I'd take C over it any day, and I hate C! Java is bae. But man was that assembly port efficient as hell. Much faster performance, and this was worth it because they were working with an Apple II with a 1MHz 6502 and 64KB or RAM if you were very lucky.

The anthithesis of this is Minecraft. A 3D game entirely based in Java. It has graphics from the late 90's but still requires surprisingly decent graphics hardware to run well. Had it been made in C, it would run smooth as hell on a GeForce 2MX I reckon. But this of course would make it too difficult for Notch to have made it himself, and would cut off the enormous modding and plugin community.

Regarding web design, many websites tend to use client side scripting like JavaScript for the overwhelming amount of operations. It's a lively quick language to write in, but of course less efficient to run because it is not as specific as a lower level language.

Now one way to maybe solve this is to use the more secure server side scripting approach such as PHP that runs the script on something such as an Apache server, so the client (browser) never even sees the code. This can be processed by a big powerful modern server. That would leave the G5 with merely the task of displaying the result. To compare it to another format it would be like playing back video in an MP4, instead of having to compile it on the fly in Final Cut.

 

[MagicBoy]

Java is bae.

and in English that means?

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

Good for you
However, you're up against it...the problem is fine tuned and targeted consumerism - there's so much profit to be made out of enforced obsolescence, to change it now requires an entire paradigm shift...maybe the next generation can do it

The thing about this is that it's not those companies doing it. But, as a result, they benefit. Maybe I could propose a bill to Congress that cites this as a cause of e-waste overflow. Wrote an essay about this a year ago. I'm president of the e-waste club at my school, and a couple kids there don't think I'm fit for the job... yet I'm the only one out of all of them who understands one of the main reasons why people throw out their 'obsolete' electronics. In an effort to at least help out the cause, I brought up the idea of refurbishing working products, but there's a stupid liability behind it. I even said that, rather than calling an e-waste company to pick up stuff, I could bring it all to the recycling center and generate some money for the club... but that was shot down. Would have been a good way to earn money AND, uh, pick through for some goodies.

But, I digress. The point is that this issue threatens consumers AND the environment, yet it's not necessarily being caused by a single person, so it would require a huge movement. Again, if I wasn't interested in my current field of design, I'd probably go into politics or environmental advocation. It's as bad as being on a personal level, since all of us are forced to let good machines go because a 'simple' Web page takes their CPUs up to 100%. The biggest issue would be that we are among the few who actually have knowledge on this. Most people don't know and/or don't care (a.k.a. people who are quick to discredit, say, a PowerPC Mac).
[doublepost=1453942064][/doublepost]Thank you for mentioning this! I tell people this all the time: If Minecraft had been made in C, we'd all be playing it on an iMac G3. It even rhymes. (Of course, compatibility issues would rule it out anyway.) I hate Java with a passion because it's a burden that stems across millions of devices. It's like an STD.

 

[tevion5]

and in English that means?

That's retarded white girl speak for "I like Java."

 

[MagicBoy]

That's retarded white girl speak for "I like Java."

*** Public Service Announcement ***
Can the retarded white girls please make themselves known to your nearest member of staff.
Thank You!

[doublepost=1453973920][/doublepost]

I hate Java with a passion because it's a burden that stems across millions of devices. It's like an STD.

Try supporting it in a corporate environment, with apps requesting incompatible versions all over the place. It's an enormous pain in the bum on Windows, to add to the woes of IE incompatbility.

 

[tevion5]

*** Public Service Announcement ***
Can the retarded white girls please make themselves known to your nearest member of staff.
Thank You!

Aww here bro. I'm not saying I'm a fan of such a perversion of the English language, but at this point I feel you might as well embrace it. Hating Michael Kors and Starbucks ain't gonna get you anywhere these days.

 

[MagicBoy]

LOL, I must be getting old.

Michael Who?
No problem with Starbucks. That said the paper cup on my desk says Costa as they got the Coffee machine contract at work.

 

[eyoungren]

That said the paper cup on my desk says Costa as they got the Coffee machine contract at work.

Hehehehehe.

I have a Costa card. Costa has no stores in the US.

I'll let you figure that one out, LOL!

 

[Hack5190]

Smartphones are being served a mobile version of the website. It's far more optimized for it.

If you have a browser on your phone that can show you web pages as a computer then try that and see what happens. Things will still load fairly well because smartphones do have faster processors (and more than one core nowadays) but it won't be as smooth or error free.

If you use a browser on a PowerPC Mac that can change the user agent and you set it to that of a smartphone then you will get mobile pages on your Mac - served much faster of course.

This is the concept behind Classila, which is Firefox for OS9.

For those of you interested in your User-Agent string (and what it revels) visit this site http://browser-information.online-domain-tools.com/

If you want to change your User-Agent string check the following:

TenFoxFour -> http://mybrowseraddon.com/useragent-switcher.html

Safari & WebKit -> http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-activate-user-agent-switcher-in-safari.html