111–120 of 213 posts
"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.
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.
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 pres…
Happy Firefox user here since Netscape Navigator days.
"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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My first experience was sending an email with the url I wanted to access to a server that would send back the hypertext document a few minutes later.
Edit: Something like https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1996-02-20-3077566-story.h...
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 f…
The original author is arguing there will be a point where there’s simply nothing new to add to the browser because it will do everything the OS does. There are any number of ways to argue just not how it works.
W3C does not publish all web standards, notably it doesn't publish the three biggest technologies used in web browsers: - HTML is worked on by WHATWG - CSS is worked on by CSSWG - JavaScript is worked on by TC39 And IE wasn't killed by features moving too fast, Microsoft made Edge browser and still does. Mozilla hasn't been killed by Google or competition, it's been kept alive in large part by Google (I think in some…
No, they don't. Edge nowadays is just a Blink shell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft makes a browser but the point people are typically making here is that Edge is just a reskin of Chromium.
Between IE and the current Chromium-based Edge browser, was born, lived, and died another browser engine named EdgeHTML. IE was 2 browser families ago from Microsoft.
Parent said: IE wasn't killed because the web moves too fast -- and used the presence of Edge (or EdgeHTML) as the argument.
But both IE and EdgeHTML were killed because Chrome moved too fast for MS to be worth it to maintain its own engine...
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…
But that's not what people (including companies making SaaS, which are also stakeholders here), want from the web.
They want an app delivery mechanism mediated through a web browser.
So web browsers will be complete the same time when OS-level frameworks, UIs, and libs are complete, so when computing is "complete".
That is, never.