When will web browsers be complete?

Post by cm2187 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:45 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #95

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.

Post by hesarenu » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:56 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #112

hesarenu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Developers that keep pushing for Chrome are the ones to blame to start with. Happy Firefox user here since Netscape Navigator days.

Post by ForHackernews » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:05 PM UTC

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…

Post by kgwgk » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:07 PM UTC

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…