Re: Replacement Email Client
On Wed, 28 Oct 2020 09:35:46 +0100
<tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote:
> For reference, I have a (severely restrained, no javascript [1])
> Firefox running. Just one tab open, showing just one jpeg from
> XKCD [2]).
>
> Top shows it as the (by far hungriest) memory user, with 263 MB.
> Second, third and fourth are... WebContent, WebExtensions and
> WebContent, which are Firefox too, just in disguise.
>
> Adding those four together towers up to roughly half a gigabyte.
> Even assuming that half of that is shared libs...
>
> Oh, fifth is Emacs, with roughly 63 MB. But it has a 500K Org
> mode file in its belly (so it's doing something useful).
>
> How did we end here? How did we end up paying for the ad
> industry's infrastrutcture, paying with our privacy, but
> also with our real money, having to buy RAM and CPU power
> just for their sake?
>
> How do we get out of here?
For the most part, it's not 'we'. When your operating system requires
4GB to work at all (and Linux is catching up fast), and most of your use
of the Net (and the computer itself) involves web pages, then half a gig
for a browser is not too unreasonable.
Those of us who do not run Windows and don't live our lives through
Twitter and Facebook are a minority. Those of us who use significant ad
blocking, those of us who try to avoid getting shown 'targetted' ads,
and those of us who don't even see most of the ads that are shown to
us, are a smaller one still. Apart from not buying things we see
advertised, there's not a whole lot we can do, and as a minority, the
advertisers will not even notice that.
But I don't think we're alone. I think many Windows users also stop
seeing ads after a while, and the bottom line is that Net adverts don't
really work. I think it was P&G proved that a year or two ago, pulling
most of their 'digital' advertising and seeing no significant drop in
sales. When enough large businesses realise that Net advertising isn't
cost-effective, that many of their 'clicks' are fake, we will see a
reduction in it.
What funds the Net after that, I don't know.
--
Joe
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