When will web browsers be complete? • Hacker News Board

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#211

Post by sfink » Fri, Oct 30, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

akrymski wrote: post #203

Alternative end game: the browser dies slowly, gradually being replaced by native apps. We're already seeing this: consumers prefer native apps on their phones for virtually everything: shopping, socialising, reading news. Surely the future us will laugh at web browsers as some ancient tech that used these weird markup languages to layout content that's monetised with ads into pages that you'd navigate back and forth…

Consumers prefer native navigation (go straight to an app, not home -> browser -> app) to apps that in practice are native wrappers around web views.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#212

Post by yodelshady » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 11:50 AM UTC

rusticpenn wrote: post #111

yodelshady wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not sure if you are sarcastic.

Nope. Cars have advanced, but if they were webtech, we'd be wondering why they've not implemented OrbitalMechanics support yet. OceanMechanics would be old hat.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#213

Post by gwern » Mon, Nov 09, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

amadeuspagel wrote: post #88

This focus on chrome os gets it completely backwards. Google doesn't expand chrome's capabilities because they need it for chrome OS, google invests in chrome and chrome OS, because it supports their search engine business. Google wants anything you might want to do with your computer to start by searching google, not some kind of app store. See: https://www.gwern.net/Complement

I would also point out the problem of "bitcreep" ( https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars ): Google can keep Chrome-OS and Chrome 'FLOSS' indefinitely much the same way it has kept Android's FLOSSness largely nominal - by simply having complex enough, slowly shifting, incompatible behavior, everything gets sucked in around it. FLOSS is slow, and can only catch up if there is a stable target. (Stephenson covers this in "In The Beginning Was The Commandline" too.) Add in the service-fication of Android, and now the key code and systems aren't even FLOSS, as the FLOSS code exists only as a partial bootloader for the services that every user (and every website or application they use?) require.