[GTALUG] pnc empower browser;

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2017-12-16 07:01 PM, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
>
> So long as
> all the JS programming used is built in to the pnc browser's binary
> installation package, this would eliminate the foolishness of repeatedly
> fetching the JS (used directly by pnc) dynamically via the Internet.

This might be a little too much to hope for, as websites may wish to
pull in their particular copy of a library to render their content. For
example, my browser cache contains five slightly different copies of the
JQuery library. As it's arbitrary code, you won't be able to tell if
your package's JS will do the same job as the site supplied one.

An interesting concept overall, but expecting browser authors to bend to
the will of the small number of dialup users is somewhat unlikely. Even
mobile-optimized sites are a bit sniffy about 3G speeds these days.

If you want a tiny browser that will only read what it understands, try
netsurf. From memory, it has a slightly unusual but not difficult
installation process — it's original from RISC OS, and assumes its
idiosyncrasies (cooperative multitasking, quite unique path handling).
netsurf has a very simple css handler that I've found to primarily
useful for debugging CSS that other browsers apply heuristics to work
around. I found an ancient CSS error that shipped with phpBB for years
until a netsurf user flagged that [code] sections weren't rendered.

cheers,
 Stewart