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When will web browsers be complete?

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Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#91

Post by madrox »

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…

Visual Studio of 20 years ago was in many ways superior to Xcode of today, but you need Xcode to make iOS apps, and iPhones are cool. Moral of the story is better technology does not always win. It’s a fallacy that technology is a continuous positive progression.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#92

Post by zokier »

Personally I feel browsers got feature complete already somewhere around 2011, Firefox 4 was a great release and did pretty much everything I would want from browser. Last really important spec feature I feel was video element, which was added around that time. Got us rid of need for crappy plugins.

Honestly I'm not sure what I'd miss if I had to go back to Fx4.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#93

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

> 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.

Honestly this happens all the time. Not only do we seem to reinvent the wheel but we almost invariably reinvent it worse. Take 'dark mode' for instance. Everybody lauds that they can switch to a different theme that they feel is easier on their eyes, apparently oblivious to the fact that we could do that in Windows 95 with significantly greater and more granular control at the OS level. This industry is overrun with complexity fetishists who keep piling on more and more abstractions and calling it progress when they manage to catch up with the less-abstracted past.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#94

Post by ImprobableTruth »

Igelau wrote: post #90
bullen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physics are not changing, it's our understanding of physics that changes, and yes we are very far from understanding them correctly. The real questions are: - For how long do we have energy to keep not understanding things. - Are the understandings leading to real improvements or just more total energy consumption (for every energy reduction there is an equal or more increase in total energy consumption)? I'm commite…

> Physics are not changing, it's our understanding of physics that changes No, it's right the way it is. Physics is a science. Physics is the understanding. The universe is terrain and sciences are maps -- though some are more localized and specialized than others.

>Physics is a science

'Physics' refers both to 'our knowledge/study of the physical' and 'the physical' in itself.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#95

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

gbh444g wrote: post #5

"There is not much left for a Web browser to cover" - this reminded me of the famous "physics is mostly complete at this point." Web (browser) is the only cross-platform operating system, even if some standards say otherwise. I'm sure we'll see docker-style virtual web environments, cross-machine abstractions to simulate datacenters for distributed computing (GPU and such), PWA-style webapps bootable from USB sticks…

> Web (browser) is the only cross-platform operating system, even if some standards say otherwise.

I'm really struggling to think of a combination of definitions for "cross-platform" and "operating system" that can make this statement true.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#96

Post by Tom4hawk »

madrox wrote: post #34
marcus_holmes wrote: post #33

I've seen the same cycle happen repeatedly in tech (there are many cycles, but this is one of them): systems are centralised on a server, then the client gets more powerful and features of the system are pushed to the client. This gets too much and the client slows down, so the features are centralised to a server again. I can easily see a world where Chrome/ium becomes too bloated to work well, and a "new web" of th…

Stadia is a great example of this

Stadia is just Google trying to centralized another thing. Their pricing is ridiculous. Group of people that are ready to pay monthly fee, pay full price for games (and remember - no used copies[big market on consoles] and no competing stores[PCs]), live so close to the Stadia servers that latency is not a problem and have a good internet connection is unbelievably small.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#97

Post by jefftk »

xorcist wrote: post #64
rmason wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a bit of a stretch. The web is hard to date, 1990 is often mentioned, but it had already spread quite a bit by 1994. Of course there's a wikipedia article on this, which counts 10k+ web sites at the end of that year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor... For most applications you would dial up a remote system anyway so many used the web by way of plain terminal software. The Lynx web…

I don't think I've seen 1990? You could make a case for 1991 or 1992, but I don't see how anyone could have been using the web in 1990 when it hadn't been even initially implemented yet?

For example, see "The Original HTTP as defined in 1991": https://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#98

Post by mstade »

xorcist wrote: post #64
rmason wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a bit of a stretch. The web is hard to date, 1990 is often mentioned, but it had already spread quite a bit by 1994. Of course there's a wikipedia article on this, which counts 10k+ web sites at the end of that year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor... For most applications you would dial up a remote system anyway so many used the web by way of plain terminal software. The Lynx web…

Case in point – in '94 I was in fourth grade at a school that made a big deal of their computer department, and how they were hooked up to the web. When geocities launched ('95?) we were making homepages as school assignments. So many "under construction" images – it was glorious!

It may not have been ubiquitous as it is today, but the web was definitely not out of reach for normal people back in '94.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#99

Post by grishka »

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…

> go back that amount of time and see how far the OS has come.

How much did it though? Strictly speaking, an OS is an abstraction on top of hardware that applications are written against. That's it. OSes of 2007 did a good job of abstracting the hardware away from applications. They also weren't as user-hostile as the modern ones, so one could argue that they were better. Operating systems had been feature-complete for quite a while. Those yearly updates serve no practical purpose.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#100

Post by BryanBigs »

kgwgk wrote: post #60
rmason wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're right. The explosion of the multi-plaform web happened in 1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libwww

I was using the web in college in 1993. After my very first experience with a browser, i thought gopher was superior. Of course, a 1200 baud connection makes graphics a bit less impressive and more of a pita.
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