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When will web browsers be complete?

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Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#71

Post by pjmlp »

hesarenu wrote: post #70
pjmlp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari only matters in 10% of the world, plenty of countries don't need to worry with customers using Safari, as no one uses any kind of Apple product and those companies have more than enough to do with their local markets.

10% is still a big big big number. You can't ignore it. When website fails on someones safari you can't just say we did not consider anyone using safari or iphone. You always try to make it work on most browsers.

Sure we can, as mentioned, there are hundreds of countries with zero presence of Apple hardware, and not everyone is playing Amazon selling to the whole world.

Local market is more than enough to keep ones busy and profitable.

See how many companies in Africa, South America or Eastern Europe countries actually care to buy Apple hardware to test Safari.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#72

Post by anonymou2 »

dmitriid wrote: post #18

The main problem with the current state of web browsers is that it's now impossible for a third party to develop a competing browser from scratch (or nearly from scratch). The already existing set is unimaginably huge, and it's a moving targets as browsers (especially Chrome) is throwing more and more features into it.

that's why project Gemini was created: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

madrox wrote: post #30

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. Loca…

> This essay could've been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer.

I've been reading a whitepaper from ~1997 on Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM) last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn't stop thinking: this is microservices. And it was really more than that - at least on the surface, this was microservices + orchestration + autoscaling + serverless, as well as, via Internet Explorer, component-based UIs with graceful degradation. That paper seems like a window to an alternate reality in which everything that's currently hot in tech has been done 20 years ago, except programming language-agnostic, using saner (i.e. binary) protocols, offline-first, and with advanced security built in from the start. I don't know why this is not our "real" reality, but I finally understand why MS was in a dominant position back then, and why IE was a hot thing.

EDIT: for the curious, the mentioned whitepaper is: https://www.softwaretoolbox.com/dcom/DCOM%20Technical%20Over....

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#74

Post by Synaesthesia »

rmason wrote: post #57
madrox wrote: post #30

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. Loca…

You literally couldn't have used the web much earlier than 1994 unless you were running a NeXT machine. I know because I've been on the net since 1988 and 1994 was when I first started browsing the web. If you were on Windows it was tricky then as you had to download and configure your own tcp/ip stack. That was possible due to the ingenuity of Peter Tattam who sold software that let you do that. I met him back then…

The first browser for windows was NCSA Mosaic. I remember installing that. When Internet Explorer came out it was so advanced! I remember it supported background images!

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#75

Post by ddlutz »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
madrox wrote: post #30

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. Loca…

> This essay could've been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. I've been reading a whitepaper from ~1997 on Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM) last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn't stop thinking: this is microservices. And it was really more than that - at least on the surface, this was microservices + orchestration + autoscaling + serverless, as well as, via Internet Explorer, component-based UIs wi…

link to the paper?

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#76

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
madrox wrote: post #30

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. Loca…

> This essay could've been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. I've been reading a whitepaper from ~1997 on Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM) last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn't stop thinking: this is microservices. And it was really more than that - at least on the surface, this was microservices + orchestration + autoscaling + serverless, as well as, via Internet Explorer, component-based UIs wi…

[deleted]

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#77

Post by SCHiM »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
madrox wrote: post #30

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. Loca…

> This essay could've been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. I've been reading a whitepaper from ~1997 on Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM) last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn't stop thinking: this is microservices. And it was really more than that - at least on the surface, this was microservices + orchestration + autoscaling + serverless, as well as, via Internet Explorer, component-based UIs wi…

This still exists! COM serves as the foundation of modern windows apps you currently see on Windows 10 (WinRT). And still actively developed in its form as WinRT.

COM sadly has a number of unfortunate characteristics though: it's quite complex to learn and it's not very secure actually (de-serialization of complex types in C anyone?)

But I think it's a wonderful technology.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#78

Post by MaxBarraclough »

pjmlp wrote: post #36
vntok wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With most people working out of Apple, Microsoft and Google salaries, good luck getting a bunch of random weekend coders to pick up and counterattack an alternative browser based on that open source.

Doesn't this depend how high we set the bar?

The ungoogled-chromium project [0] presumably doesn't take all that much manpower as it's just taking Chromium and paring it down a little. A true alternative browser codebase like Firefox, with its own rendering engine and JavaScript engine, takes a great deal of effort, of course.

[0] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#79

Post by names_are_hard »

pjmlp wrote: post #71
hesarenu wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10% is still a big big big number. You can't ignore it. When website fails on someones safari you can't just say we did not consider anyone using safari or iphone. You always try to make it work on most browsers.

Sure we can, as mentioned, there are hundreds of countries with zero presence of Apple hardware, and not everyone is playing Amazon selling to the whole world. Local market is more than enough to keep ones busy and profitable. See how many companies in Africa, South America or Eastern Europe countries actually care to buy Apple hardware to test Safari.

Nit: There aren't hundreds of countries that have zero presence of Apple hardware because there aren't hundreds of countries in the world. Depending on how you count, the are about 195 countries in the world today. I think you need at least 200 to say "hundreds" and even then it's a stretch.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

SCHiM wrote: post #77
TeMPOraL wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This essay could've been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. I've been reading a whitepaper from ~1997 on Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM) last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn't stop thinking: this is microservices. And it was really more than that - at least on the surface, this was microservices + orchestration + autoscaling + serverless, as well as, via Internet Explorer, component-based UIs wi…

This still exists! COM serves as the foundation of modern windows apps you currently see on Windows 10 (WinRT). And still actively developed in its form as WinRT. COM sadly has a number of unfortunate characteristics though: it's quite complex to learn and it's not very secure actually (de-serialization of complex types in C anyone?) But I think it's a wonderful technology.

I'm currently having an opportunity to learn it, as I need to interface with a piece of legacy software that works over DCOM. I thought this would be a nightmare, as all my previous brief encounters with COM/DCOM left a bad taste (obscure errors full of GUIDs, registry hacking), but now that I'm actually trying to learn what the thing is, I'm becoming more and more in awe of it.
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