[aidanbeck]

I was going to comment on the Terence Eden excerpt quoted by the author about the woman researching housing benefits on an old PSP browser, when I noticed that you (the OP) are Terence himself. It's strikingly powerful, and a reminder of the duty we have in building our infrastructure.

> Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures.

It is frightening to think of how many people are alienated from critical systems every day because of this bias reinforcing the idea that they do not exist.

[kristianp]

The PSP has 32MB of RAM plus 4MB of embedded RAM, upgraded to 64MB of RAM in later models, the browser also is limited to only a subset of that. I wonder how old the anecdote is? It's hard to imagine any websites now working on that. It does have javascript, but a version shipped with Netfront browser from 2011 or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable#Web_brows...

Nice to see that Astro supports non-js browsers. Perhaps website developers, especially ones needing to develop for government services, should use 1GB Raspberry Pis for testing, but that would still have modern javascript. I got a 1GB RPi 4 in about mid-2019 and was rudely reminded of how much memory Chrome used even back then. More than 1 tab open and it would be killed.

The Eden quote is here https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven... and it has some stats of gaming consoles using uk government sites.

[dlcarrier]

I used PSP browser a lot in the mate 2000's, and don't remember having much trouble. It could even display pages that, at the time, ware pretty bloated, like the Flash-based Homestar Runner cartoons.

[genewitch]

just use firefox with an adblocker like adnauseam and a fairly decent chunk of the internet stops working, including chase.com and several other massive corp sites.

I can't imagine trying to use links/lynx or a browser with less market share than FF that isn't based on chromium.

[nunez]

Chase works with ad blockers, though.

It doesn't work if you disable JavaScript...but it wasn't always this way!

They had a mobile version of their online banking service at https://m.chase.com that was EXTREMELY FAST and did 85% of what you need to do in an online banking portal (check balances, transfer funds). They scrapped it when they moved to their current bloated monstrosity of the portal that they have today.

It was a big reason why I moved to a credit union (who outsources their online banking services to Alkami, which maintains a very tight portal and supports 2FA AND passkeys!).

[genewitch]

i am unclear on if it's because of the adblocker (specifically i use ad nauseam which does block some JS. some.) or because of firefox. I can load it on edge every time it fails on firefox. last week, chase.com worked fine on firefox. the previous 15 months where i needed to log in, it did not.

Someone at chase isn't checking their work on firefox.

[dlcarrier]

CDNs like Cloudflare will often block traffic if you don't leak enough data to differentiate yourself from a bot. It's usually not very transparent either, with vague error messages. They've given up on just throwing up a captcha then letting you proceed, because bots are much better than real people, at solving them.

[enlightens]

FWIW I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and Enhanced Tracking Protection, and use Chase's website almost weekly. No issues that I've noticed on MacOS or Windows

[nunez]

When I have to log into Chase on my computer, I do via Firefox, and it works fine. Maybe you flipped something on in about:config that's breaking it?

[genewitch]

i love that i'm holding it wrong. thanks, HN.

[natbobc]

And that is what pixel tracking is for. :)

[kristianp]

What's wrong with web server logs? That would give you the number of visitors, if not the pageviews on an SPA.