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When will web browsers be complete?

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Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#21

Post by the_gipsy »

ksec wrote: post #13

Let's talk about Web Page for a minute, or Web Page with some interactivity and animations . Are there any Web Page, render in Web Browser, both the page itself, and the standard itself, that gives the smoothness of say opening a PDF, or even better, a Native App. Does the Apple Store Web Page for selling iPhone felt as smooth as their Apple Store App on your iOS? Jank ( micro- pause ) are still everywhere. Both the…

I don't remember the app store app being smooth.

I do agree about the "janks".

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#22

Post by nikitaga »

Chrome OS being open source is not a threat to Google for several reasons:

The usefulness of the browser is that it's a cross-platform platform. You can run the same web apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, even mobile devices.

Turning the browser itself into an OS-level platform will just create another platform that will need to compete with all existing platforms while having nothing unique to offer – after all, the same web apps run just fine on existing platforms, by their very design.

What does ChromeOS have that MacOS or Linux do not have and can't have?

You could argue that someone could build a competitor to iOS and Android using ChromeOS, but why wouldn't the same someone build a competitor using... Android? It's open source too.

Because if they take Android source without Google's blessing, they would be left without Google maps, docs, and gmail. But Google can just as easily exclude mobile browsers from accessing their web services. In today's world it would be perfectly fine for Google to only offer their services through native apps on mobile, and it's up to them which platforms they choose to publish those apps on.

Oh and then there's Widevine. You need Google's blessing to decrypt that, and even if you get it, every content provider that uses Widevine DRM can block access to their content from your browser for any reason (you can't bypass that).

How far will your rebel browser platform go without being able to play e.g. youtube? Currently they only DRM certain types of videos, but what would stop them from flipping the switch and applying DRM to every video that is monetized on youtube, and blocking your browser on the basis that it allows adblockers that effectively prevent funding of those videos?

The notion that Google is somehow – anyhow – in a weak position is utterly ridiculous. Their moat is stronger than ever.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#24

Post by konjin »

cageface wrote: post #20
tannhaeuser wrote: post #9

> there is not much more distance to cover [relative to native toolkits] As I see it, the web as originally conceived was "ready" around 2003, and then again around 2009 when CSS media queries became mainstream to adapt to mobile usage. For me, the excessive push for browser APIs as a desktop replacement since then, and the proliferation of frameworks is a generational thing, driven not by technology but by big data,…

The alternative is an internet completely locked down in native apps in proprietary and unaccountable app stores. I'll take a bloated web browser over a corporate monoculture any day.

Sorry which is which? Because right now Chrome engine has more control of the web then IE did in it's heyday when Microsoft was ruled to be a monopoly.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#25

Post by bloody-crow »

Quick comment on the presentation. This post could very easily be markdown and therefore rendered in a nice readable non-monospaced font. Instead it's a .txt and it's really painful to read.

Edit: here's a rendered markdown conversion that is easier on the eyes: https://shrib.com/?v=nc#CapeStarling-6v1L9J

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#27

Post by enos_feedler »

onion2k wrote: post #19

We will reach feature-parity with our local Operating Systems. The author states this in a way that makes it sound like it's possible, but that betrays an assumption that operating systems aren't moving forwards and innovating as well. The web will always lag behind the new features that come to OSs, and therefore browsers will always need to be changing in order to give web users access to those features.

Not only are operating systems moving forward in their own direction, they are picking up the missing pieces that were traditionally reserved for the web. The two most important being URLs for deep linking between apps (universal links) and installing/fetching without redirect to a download page (app clips).

At some point we will cut out the store publishing step for certain classes of same apps running in safe runtimes (wasm with some native bindings with safe data management).

Then what is the difference? You might say compatibility across platforms. But compatibility really is broken in browsers today. So....

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#28

Post by vntok »

konjin wrote: post #24
cageface wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is an internet completely locked down in native apps in proprietary and unaccountable app stores. I'll take a bloated web browser over a corporate monoculture any day.

Sorry which is which? Because right now Chrome engine has more control of the web then IE did in it's heyday when Microsoft was ruled to be a monopoly.

Are you aware that Blink, Webkit and V8 are all open source?

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#29

Post by tannhaeuser »

cageface wrote: post #20
tannhaeuser wrote: post #9

> there is not much more distance to cover [relative to native toolkits] As I see it, the web as originally conceived was "ready" around 2003, and then again around 2009 when CSS media queries became mainstream to adapt to mobile usage. For me, the excessive push for browser APIs as a desktop replacement since then, and the proliferation of frameworks is a generational thing, driven not by technology but by big data,…

The alternative is an internet completely locked down in native apps in proprietary and unaccountable app stores. I'll take a bloated web browser over a corporate monoculture any day.

Yes the universal portability argument and fear of closed ecosystems is the carrot to put in front of a generation who experienced MS monoculture and the dangers of app stores not welcoming to GPL and other F/OSS licensing scheme. With the consequence of the web becoming a closed network itself, like AOL and CompuServe which the web was intended to replace. It's a selfish, narrow-minded motive of nerds putting their stuff into the browser using their preferred language and uniform platform/toolchain, without benefit for end-users.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#30

Post by madrox »

When this essay started with "As someone who has used the Web since 2007" I immediately felt old, so thanks for that. As someone who has been using the Web since 1994 (and I feel like I was late to the game), I can assure the author their perspective has a lot of recency bias and this isn't something to worry about, in the general sense. Or worry about it, because it already happened a while ago. Take your pick.

Local operating systems, which this essay says is the gold standard of feature sets, are not standing still. If you think of how long it will take for browsers to reach current parity, go back that amount of time and see how far the OS has come.

But let's consider, for a moment, that browsers catch up. Let's just look at native development in general, since this has had access to all local OS features since before the web. Has that never changed? It's changing all the time. We're finding higher abstractions to work with. We're making it easier. I highly doubt Grid and Flexbox as they exist today will still be how web layout works in 20 years.

Google isn't even the first to scare the world. This essay could've been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. Stop laughing. It held even more dominance than Chrome does today, and was closed source. Somehow we survived...which is good, because VRML sucked.

However, even with all that aside, people have been rolling their own browsers for years. People fork chromium today. The dark web exists. Maybe in 20 years lots of people will be streaming everything from a private cloud supercomputer vis-a-vis Stadia. The internet is no more homogeneous than all the people of the world. Everyone is finding new ways to access it all the time. This is why open standards are more important than browsers. It means anyone can build their own at any time based on the documentation and it can all read the same documents.

So I wouldn't worry about this coming to pass in quite the way you think. Though running your browser in a VM isn't the worst idea.

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