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When will web browsers be complete?

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Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#171

Post by mdip »

> ... used the Web since 2007

Am I really that old?

Something that was stated, but not directly, is what's driven a lot of the latest additions to the browser: Cross-platform development.

The operating system provided the abstractions around various hardware implementations in the past, which meant being able to (possibly) run your software, if re-compiled, on different hardware platforms (it reality, some OSes weren't available except on a single platform and others were frequently not straight forward to get compiling on different platforms).

The browser is providing abstractions to the same hardware around various OS implementations. Add in WebAssembly, and you can pick from a number of languages -- including those that were traditionally used to write apps not designed to run in browsers.

But to the quote: I was cleaning out my basement, which quickly became a "treasure hunt" of sorts since I've been storing things that I took from my parents' house when I moved out.

My favorite find was a CD-ROM that was basically a CD-based Search Engine of the Internet. It was "Designed for Windows 95" and was probably a free disc given to me by a vendor rep when I worked at CompUSA in my teens. I'm tempted to see how many of these actual sites still exist (I'm sure none of the deep links do). Incredibly, these things probably sold very well back then. It even came with a browser (neither Mosaic nor Netscape; no clue who's it is).

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#172

Post by pessimizer »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #152
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…

This is presented in a sort of hyperbolic way. But I do really think this is the future- and not as far off as people think. But not for nefarious reasons. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Average users value performance, cost, and battery life. The cost efficiency and capabilities of cloud compute will always outpace that of consumer mobile devices. So remote compute with zero user control is inevitab…

Yet somehow every site became a single-page app rendered client-side. I'm absolutely certain that browsing consumes at least twice the power it did 10 years ago (and 5x the RAM.)

I visit a lot of the same pages I did 10 years ago, but now they take as long as they would have taken 20 years ago to render.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#173

Post by thro1 »

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…

You could. X.25. Gopher.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#174

Post by knowledge-clay »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #152
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…

This is presented in a sort of hyperbolic way. But I do really think this is the future- and not as far off as people think. But not for nefarious reasons. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Average users value performance, cost, and battery life. The cost efficiency and capabilities of cloud compute will always outpace that of consumer mobile devices. So remote compute with zero user control is inevitab…

> Average users value performance, cost, and battery life. The cost efficiency and capabilities of cloud compute will always outpace that of consumer mobile devices. So remote compute with zero user control is inevitable.

I don't think this is a question of what users value, it's a question of what large software companies value. Non-technical users absolutely value their privacy and freedom even if they don't put it in explicitly ideological terms: they want to pirate copyrighted material, they are annoyed by paywalls and ads, they are creeped out by how much social networks knows about them.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#175

Post by willseth »

The author has very limited knowledge of the web, its history, or the W3C's ambitions (not to mention WHATWG, IETF, ECMA, etc.). His view of the web in general is bafflingly myopic, with an almost completely arbitrary understanding of the businesses discussed. It should come as no surprise that the conclusions he draws are non sequitur.

So why has this been upvoted? Why is this on HN at all? It's ignorant nonsense. This should be obvious to anyone who's spent more than a few hours researching these topics. Please stop taking no-nothing randos seriously.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#176

Post by marcus_holmes »

nwah1 wrote: post #170
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…

Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles are doing this.

Yeah, you're right. I hoped it wouldn't come from the giants, but as a grassroots tech thing, but I guess we don't live in that world any more.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#177

Post by mdip »

madrox wrote: post #91
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…

Visual Studio of 20 years ago was in many ways superior to Xcode of today, but you need Xcode to make iOS apps, and iPhones are cool. Moral of the story is better technology does not always win. It’s a fallacy that technology is a continuous positive progression.

So I say this having used XCode about 10 years ago, but is XCode really that bad?

Around 2000 or so, I was installing the Visual Studio -- Pre .NET Version -- on a number of new developer workstations. I was not a Helpdesk or Desktop tech, but worked supporting servers -- they sent me over to do the installs because invariably "something wouldn't launch". Different IDEs were used depending on what language you were writing in with this monster of an app that was used to write programs in Visual Basic[0]. And the program was 5-10 times larger than the largest installed application and came with 2 CD-ROMs worth of documentation that needed to be installed locally[1]. I remember I'd start all of the installs at the same time because they took several hours to complete.

[0] If it isn't obvious, this was a one-off job that I don't recall very much about. I didn't start using a Microsoft IDE until the first release of Visual Studio .NET (retroactively renamed "Visual Studio .NET 2002", I think).

[1] For the younger among us, that's about 1.5GB in a world where two years earlier 16GB of HDD was very expensive.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#178

Post by billyjobob »

willseth wrote: post #175

The author has very limited knowledge of the web, its history, or the W3C's ambitions (not to mention WHATWG, IETF, ECMA, etc.). His view of the web in general is bafflingly myopic, with an almost completely arbitrary understanding of the businesses discussed. It should come as no surprise that the conclusions he draws are non sequitur. So why has this been upvoted? Why is this on HN at all? It's ignorant nonsense. T…

It does say "As someone who has used the Web since 2007" so I guess it's written by a child? So probably we shouldn't be too harsh judging them.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#179

Post by Existenceblinks »

I have a complete unlovely thought; web browser needs a rewrite with thin web specs (imagine javascript the good part book meme). People think it's impossible to rewrite, but I believe it's only because it's a mess. Inventing a new programming language and new DOM api that works greatly with webassembly probably worth it, consider that the next 10 years the web is still not going anywhere. You may laugh at Flash .. but hey do you love "hydration" thing? I'd love to have an isomorphic?(terrible name) template engine that rendered as text as well as client program binary. Do you love OS based form control that can't be styled? I'd love a complete separate controls from OS, clean the contract between widget and actual system api. Just stop caring (coercing) how it looks, just provide api to enforce how its functionality works, we already have these bunch of aria- thing.

The question is what block the progress of making it complete, what kind of problem? I believe it's not a technical problem. Maybe incentive?

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#180

Post by acoard »

fergie wrote: post #143
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…

I have to confess that I didnt know anything about WHATWG until I read this comment- I always assumed that HTML was defined by W3C.

To be clear, initially HTML was defined by the W3C. Then when they tried to replace HTML with XML and the browser vendors revolted, the W3C essentially lost control over this.

Basically the W3C over-played it's hand. It thought by re-writing standards from HTML to XML it could force Apple/Opera/Mozilla to re-write. In the end, the browser vendors got together and created a new body that would be responsible for HTML. They've skirmished for control, but there's no question WHATWG and browser vendors are in ascendency. From 2007-2019 they both had competing standards of HTML, but since the browser vendors were on WHATWG they would just implement their own version making it the de-facto standard. So, in 2019 W3C announced they'd just use the WHATWG HTML.[0]

I expect if the W3C pushes anything the vendors consider too arduous (eg a re-write of CSS into constraints), then WHATWG would create a CSS working group and the process would repeat.

This reminds me a lot of the power of the Supreme Court, specifically President Johnson's quote about it when they made a ruling he didn't like. "[The Chief Justice on the court] has made his decision; now let him enforce it"[1] The stakeholders of WHATWG have an army (of browser coders), whereas W3C needs to rule by consent of the ruled like the Supreme Court does.

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia#Enforceme...

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