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When will web browsers be complete?

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Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#131

Post by grishka »

madrox wrote: post #116
grishka wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This same argument could be made about browsers depending on the value one places on specific advances. 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.

I personally don't think browsers need to be able to do stuff like exposing USB, Bluetooth and MIDI to websites. They aren't a substitute for a real OS as an app platform, and they should stop trying to become one. They're for reading (hyper)text, writing text (including filling forms), and watching videos.

An aside: as someone who comes from Android app development and now makes a hobby project that includes a web interface, making the browser do what I want it to feels like I'm building a UI in a Word document, complete with macros. The ability to have this free-flowing text that isn't contained in anything, this whole concept of "inline elements" still hurts my head. I'm too used to real UI frameworks where any text is only allowed to exist inside a TextView.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#132

Post by crazygringo »

> As we move forward, eventually, there will be nothing left to propose for the Open Web Platform. We will reach feature-parity with our local Operating Systems.

But operating systems continue to innovate/improve/change at roughly the same rate as browsers these days, no?

So it seems like a total logical fallacy that the browser would ever be complete. People always come up with new ideas and better solutions for things users need, new hardware arises that needs software support and input, etc.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#133

Post by lizknope »

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…

I started college in the fall of 1993. I went to a science and math boarding school for high school where we had Internet access. We used Archie to find FTP sites to find stuff.

I think it was Christmas break 1993 when a high school friend came to visit (he went to a different college) and started up Mosaic. I asked him what it was and then he laughed that I was still using Archie and FTP to find stuff.

I think it was xmosaic version 0.9 or something like that.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#134

Post by TeMPOraL »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #127
hrktb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How on earth can anyone think that each application having to individually implement support for a bespoke "dark mode" is a better situation than having more granular controls in the OS and applications just follow the UI guidelines is beyond me. It's bullshit like that that makes me want to leave IT forever.

It's probably the unfortunate consequence of a typical software vendor's perspective.

There's a deep conflict between the interests of users and software vendors, a conflict for control over presentation. It's blindingly visible on the web, and half the reason it's in such shitty state it is, but it also applies to desktop software. The problem is that for a vendor, application's UI and UX are marketing space, and they want total control over "user's journey". For the user, UI/UX are things that stand between them and the work they want to get done, so they want it to be effort- and bullshit-free. For non-tech-savvy users this implies "consistent with all other software they use"; for power users, this means "able to be altered or removed" - but both of those viewpoints require vendor to not have the final say about presentation.

In context of dark mode, an OS-level control over UI styling is a user-friendly feature. Unfortunately, it got defeated by vendors who want the UI to be their branding space, and now they have to begrudgingly add dark mode themselves.

EDIT: see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24918296 upthread, it seems to be a quite accurate description of what will happen if we let the vendor side win.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#135

Post by taffer »

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…

As far as I know SOA is a concept and DCOM and CORBA are implementations of this concept. Microservices are a more lightweight variant of SOA, but basically the same idea.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#136

Post by totallymike »

chrismorgan wrote: post #102

> 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 su…

Decent point. If my recollection is accurate, a number of browsers or other implementations must already implement something before it can become standard.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#137

Post by eCa »

bloody-crow wrote: post #25

Quick comment on the presentation. This post could very easily be markdown and therefore rendered in a nice readable non-monospaced font. Instead it's a .txt and it's really painful to read. Edit: here's a rendered markdown conversion that is easier on the eyes: https://shrib.com/?v=nc#CapeStarling-6v1L9J

I recommend the raw rendering, followed by the browser’s reader mode.

But I agree in principle.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#138

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

...added electrical subsystem, replaced combustion engine with batteries and electric motors, we're adding various degree of autonomy.

In parallel, we've replaced sane controls with frustrating and dangerous touchscreens, we've added countless types of comfort features, we've improved security, we've computerized engine controls, we've DRMed the car - ostensibly to prevent theft, but actually to route more money from aftermarket towards the manufacturers. Etc.

Cars do suffer feature creep, and not all of the features are beneficial to their owners. Just like with the web.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#139

Post by userbinator »

pessimizer wrote: post #130

They'll be complete when users have absolutely no way to interact with a web page other than what was explicitly intended by the company serving the web page, and when every possible interaction between the user and their computer is reported back to the the web page they're accessing. There will be three browsers: The "Safe Browser" which will be used by 85% of people, the "Smart Browser" which will be used by 5% of…

...and there will be a 4th one used by almost 0% of people, which is illegal to use along with the general-purpose computer that's required to use it, but provides the user complete control:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

IMHO the web started to go down this path in the late 2000s. Recent developments (manifestv3, DoH, youtube-dl, etc.) are only further indications of the continuing trend towards increasing corporate control and dumbing-down of the users (so they become less likely to oppose.)

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