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When will web browsers be complete?

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Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#161

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ktpsns wrote: post #42
cft wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 20 years it will be impossible to manually browse to an unapproved "unsafe" URL in a general purpose browser.

Well, its hardly possible to manually browse an unapproved unsafe URL even today. Ever tried to browse a site with a self-signed certificate? In most browsers you have to do a lot of extra clicks to get in. But there will always be special purpose browsers. There is "TOR browser" today, and we will have "vintage web browsers" the same way we have CLI/TLI browsers still today (thinking of elinks and lynx), or the same…

All the certificate verifies is that the server you are connected to actually belongs to someone who controls the domain that it's hosted at.

You can get one issued for free just by demonstrating that you actually control the domain.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#165

Post by kgwgk »

CPLX wrote: post #124
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 could have also been in a college in 1994, as I was, where there was easy access to the new-ish at the time World Wide Web via every computer in every lab. Your comment doesn’t seem accurate, it was starting to catch on pretty aggressively by 1994.

But 1994 is not much earlier than 1994, right? How is the comment you reply to inaccurate? The first non-NeXT browsers appeared in 1992 (unless you count the Line Mode Browser from 1991).

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#166

Post by modo_mario »

err4nt wrote: post #2

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…

>the problem at Mozilla is bad management for the last decade.

It sure is a problem but I'd say Google's market dominance not being an issue is false. Remember when H264 became the standard just because Google decided it after what must've felt like a fakeout to mozilla. Then had to start working on a non proprietary implementation of what google already had ready. This was back when people consistently complained bout firefox having fallen behind because a single youtube tab could make the entire browser lag and when chrom(ium) wasn't as dominant as it is today.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#167

Post by mattl »

bluGill wrote: post #141
znpy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly enough, the "N" in "GNOME" was due to the fact that it was initially based on CORBA, and used a C-language ORB called orbit (IIRC). If someone older than me would like to chime in and add some details, that would be lovely.

KDE and GNOME agreed in the early days that both desktops would be based on COBRA and use standard object names so the two would be compatible. After fighting COBRA for a while KDE said this is too complex/slow and wrote DCOM (I might remember this name wrong) which gave them the parts they wanted without the overhead. GNOME stuck with COBRA longer, but I get the sense that they half agreed and were just hoping they…

The issue with KDE was that Qt was nonfree so there was also a few efforts to replace Qt with something else.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#168

Post by mattl »

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…

August 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Mode_Browser

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#169

Post by emteycz »

c-smile wrote: post #148

Why plural? Probably "the web browser" is more correct term these days, no? The idea of "browser as OS" or "OS as browser" is not that new. That move started by "active desktop" concept on Windows 95 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop ). And speaking about browser... It's main goal is to serve following tasks: 1. To provide safe browsing experience. 2. To present content to the user. Note that the order o…

Soon CPUs and GPUs will be so fast and so efficient and so cheap that it doesn't matter.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#170

Post by nwah1 »

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…

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