I was discussing a few days ago with a friend about the shit state of the Internet in 2023, and I realized not only that “the Internet” now means like 5 sites and/or apps. These are horrifically coded, they use a shit ton of Javascript for the most mundane things imaginable and end up using several gigabytes of RAM at some point.

This should have never happened. Technology has progressed exponentially over the last twenty years or so, but humanity is lagging behind. Not only we didn’t progress at the same pace technology has, but we also found ways to regress. Instead of making better and faster apps, we completely ditched the idea of optimisation and replaced it with throwing more hamsters under the hood. In today’s consumerist world, we need a mobile phone with 4K displays and 12GB of RAM to just look at 20 seconds videos of people reacting to someone else’s content.

We, as content creators, don’t need this, we need to focus more on content and the quality of it. Information should be free. Information should be easy to reach. Information should never be hidden past man-made walls or fences. Information should be accessible on both state-of-the-art devices, as well as on some old laptop from 20 years ago that you still have and play old games on. Or that beast of a tablet from 16 years ago.

So I did some checking on some older devices and browsers and I was able to make the site readable on older computers. So I made it a bit more accessible on lower resolutions, added some fallback images for the SVG icons used, and most important, I disabled HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). While I’ll always advocate for using HTTPS for your own protection and to ensure the sites you visit are who they claim to be, I don’t think it’s important to force this view on my readers (both of them!) because I’m not a bank, nor deal with ultra-sensitive information that needs to be encrypted.

I’ve tested with very satisfying results on some of the gadgets I play with from time to time and some of the most recent tested: Huawei P20 Lite, PlayStation Vita, HTC One, iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPad mini, Kindle Fire 7, Sony P series, Macbook (2006), Sony Vaio (2007).

I’ve also tested this on some older browsers I had laying around in an old virtual machine: Opera 12.16 (2013), Firefox 26 (2013). I’ve also checked on the now defunct Internet Explorer 7 (2006) & IE 8 (2009) and while it has limited support, it is still readable.

To celebrate that, here are some screenshots of the website on the devices mentioned above.