Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Jetpack and the Battle For the Web
snydeq writes "Mozilla Jetpack makes it so easy to filter, modify, and mash up pages that it might end up pitting developers and users against content producers in a battle for the Web, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. By allowing users to modify the behavior, presentation, and output of Web apps and pages to their liking, Jetpack gives users the ability to 'patch the server, in a sense,' McAllister writes, bringing us one step closer to a more democratic Web. Good news for developers and users; not so good for SaaS providers and media companies that have a vested interest in controlling the function, presentation, and distribution of Web-based content and apps. In other words, as Jetpack produces fruit, expect more producers to call for 'guardrails for the Internet.'"
And so the new slashdot layout is finally explained in full.
Yes. There's so much crap running on Slashdot's pages now that Firefox sometimes reports that a script is running too long. Pages load slowly because the five or so different ad servers all need time to respond. The page code has "document.write()" calls which load more Javascript, forcing operations which ought to be in parallel to wait for the previous step to complete. I just had a Slashdot page load wait 9 seconds for "bs.serving-sys.com". That's a 9 second delay for a useless site that's trying to load a "tracking cookie". A Jetpack add-on to block all that stuff will be a huge win.