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When will web browsers be complete?

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Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#101

Post by gmueckl »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #93
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…

> 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 i…

The problem with the fine grained user control over individual theme colors is that the OS theme is never complete enough for applications with visually complex UIs. At some point, applications have a need for extra colors to denote things in different ways. So they would need to provide their own configuration UI that allows the user to update these colors to be usable with any custom theme they're running. Unfortunately, most software developers never bothered to implement something like this and assumed the user would be running the default theme. So the users ended up with lots of broken UIs after trying to adjust the system wide theme.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#102

Post by chrismorgan »

> So what is the Web? Well we can agree the Web is a conglomerate of standards proposed by the W3C.

No, I can’t agree with that because it hasn’t ever been true. For its first decade, it was the place where most relevant standards were proposed, but that still didn’t define the web; you had to look at what browsers did rather than what specs said, especially in such days as IE’s domination, because it varied quite substantially from the “standards”, and more importantly people depended on these variations and extensions to the “standards”.

But then W3C tried to take the web further in a direction that the actual people with power (browser manufacturers) didn’t like—more XML everywhere, and little to no activity on HTML itself—and so they split and formed WHATWG which has since taken over progressively more and more of the actual important standards (e.g. HTML, DOM, URL, Fetch, Encoding), so that W3C itself is increasingly irrelevant, though there are still important things that are done through W3C, e.g. the CSS Working Group (CSSWG); and if you’re willing to stretch it, you could count the Web Incubator Community Group (WICG), but that’s more hosted by W3C than part of W3C.

Nowadays, if you say, “what is the web?”, you must include specifications from at least IETF (e.g. HTTP), WHATWG (e.g. HTML), W3C (e.g. CSS) and Ecma (e.g. JavaScript); but actual browser behaviour (an extremely vague concept) must also be considered too, because it has a big impact on what the web is.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#103

Post by dwheeler »

yodelshady wrote: post #62
Hurtak wrote: post #31

"When will operating systems be complete?" "When will car technology be complete?" ... The answer is they wont be in short term, and they will be made obsolete in the long term.

Cars don't suffer feature creep. We've optimised them - removed the horse, switched to steel construction, added electrical subsystem - but really there's been no major functional change in cars, ever.

Um, what?

Our expectations about cars have definitely changed over time. I don't think it's even legal to sell new cars without seatbelts, something that did not exist when cars started. Even low end cars in the US have added features compared to low end cars of the past, such as power windows, power steering, power mirrors, and so on.

It's true that adding features is slower in cars, but that is because cars are partially hardware. It takes much longer to add features to hardware, because making copies is not free. But that does not mean they are unchanged.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#104

Post by hesarenu »

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.

And there are hundreds with Apple hardware even once which cause an issue. It might be ok for corporate to dictate browsers but other can't ignore any percentage of browsers. I see many comments on how it works only on chrome, you would assume that we should ignore that since it majority why should be optimize for others. See we even can't optimize for chrome since we have safari which has some functionality not present.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#105

Post by golergka »

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…

It often happens when the technology satisfies a need the market haven't really felt yet. Microservices are hot now because many companies and individual developers have already felt the pain on their own experience. Without such experience, advanced technology just seems "unnecessary complicated" compared to the simple LAMP-based monolith that "just gets the job done".

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#106

Post by hrktb »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #93
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…

> 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 i…

I think we should separate ideas/proof of concepts that were in the field and presented as having potential, and implementations that are largely adopted and reliable.

There will always be a lag between the two, and it won’t just be ‘reinventing the wheel’.

I had a look at CORBA and it was horrible in many ways. Interestingly it’s something that works and is proven at large scale but nobody would want to have it for small/middle scale non enterprisy applications, and it might not even be a good idea at large scale depending on what properties are valued. In no way I’d see kubernetes with services as a worse version of it, we didn’t choose it just by ignorance or hype.

Same with “dark mode“ on win 95. Most programs couldn’t even properly handle text sizes, it was a i18n nightmare that was just brushed under the carpet. Changing text and background colors was the same, with some apps somewhat working because they Mostly relied on default widgets, and a mess of unusable apps on the side that just had text colors baked. You had a better chance to have it work by plain inverting all colors through the accessibility settings.

To be fair it’s still partly a mess now, but we are in a way better situation that in Win95 , it is understood at an application level, it actually makes sense now.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#107

Post by pjc50 »

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…

It may have been language-agnostic, but it was never going to be OS-agnostic. Like everything Microsoft it only worked with Microsoft implementations on both ends.

> saner (i.e. binary) protocols

.. which only had one canonical implementation on each end.

If I remember rightly, the protocol for accessing Exchange from Outlook was MAPI over either DCOM or DCE/RPC. Despite some reverse engineering efforts, this is why there were no Open Source drop-in replacements for Exchange, and clients accessing Exchange always did so over IMAP, thereby losing features.

Similarly SAMBA is DCE/RPC. https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/DCERPC

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#108

Post by pjc50 »

hrktb wrote: post #106
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

I think we should separate ideas/proof of concepts that were in the field and presented as having potential, and implementations that are largely adopted and reliable. There will always be a lag between the two, and it won’t just be ‘reinventing the wheel’. I had a look at CORBA and it was horrible in many ways. Interestingly it’s something that works and is proven at large scale but nobody would want to have it for…

You could have "dark mode" in Windows 3.0. Provided programs used the standard widgets and the correct "named" colours, everything would pick up the colour changes from the operating system.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#109

Post by pjmlp »

names_are_hard wrote: post #79
pjmlp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, but that is a form of speech, doesn't mean necessarily a numeric value. :)

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/hundred

> If you refer to hundreds of things or people, you are emphasizing that there are very many of them.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#110

Post by pjmlp »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #78
pjmlp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends, check the recent stories about X.org being abandonware, yet it is open source.
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