Published 2024-07-31
tag(s): #smallweb #yell-at-cloud
When I first tried EWW, the Emacs web browser, a couple years ago, one of the most annoying
things about it (other than not supporting JS) was the lack of tabs.
As any other human being, I too went through a phase of having a ton of tabs open in my
browser, from things to read later to items I didn't want to forget about.
These days I tend to keep a pretty small number (between 5 and 10 or so) and make a point of
closing something right after using it.
When I navigate from EWW now, though, I don't miss tabs. There's a marked difference in how I consume "the regular web" and "the small web", which I noticed earlier today.
Like any other developer, I sometimes search Stack Overflow for a code snippet, an error
message, etc. Or like any other nerd, I open reddit and look for information about a piece of
hardware, reviews for media or a software library.
The way it goes is that I search in DuckDuckGo (and sometimes, Google) and open each promising
result in a new tab. Then I check them out one by one, some of them spin off new tabs, others
are closed. If needed go back to the search tab and refine the search terms.
No matter the browser, I open one of my bookmarked sites and check out the content. If I am
reading a blog post, I just follow links, and after reading any content I go back to the
original post.
If the site I landed on seems interesting, I open a new buffer/tab in the
background with its homepage, and usually later in the day I check it out.
The first difference is intent.
Web content tends to be attention grabbing. A reddit thread with a review for, say,
headphones, will have a lot of comments to scroll through. A site with reviews has "related
content" through the article with more reviews for similar products. Looking for something in
Amazon [1] means that you end up navigating a sea of alternatives.
In contrast, most small web sites are just someone's writing. No ulterior motives, no upvotes
to cast or infinite scrolling.
The second difference I see is technical: how quickly do sites load and you get to the
content.
In my Firefox flow, each site is loading as I go over my search results. When looking at a
result, if a link doesn't open in a new tab (or I forget to middle-click), there's a certain
annoyance as I navigate back to the original page and have to wait until the content loads
again.
In EWW, despite being a slower browser, the content is there immediately, because it is just
text and images. Nothing dynamic about it.
At the end of the day, I don't "fear" (bear with the hyperbole) following a link and coming back when navigating the small web: I won't lose my train of though, and I won't be pulled in a different direction.