111–120 of 226 posts
The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……
Sometimes I wonder whether having the document-based-web and application-web in one place a good thing or bad. Ideally the document based web would require only a subset of standards (html, css, and javascript) and should be much simpler to implement a browser. Then anything more complex could just "Open in an app runner environment". But then of course since the application-web subsumes the document based one, there…
Who do you think would benefit from having two webs, and how?
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The "weaponization of complexity" is real—modern web standards are an endless labyrinth of APIs, performance optimizations, and security requirements. Large players like Google have the resources to dictate how the web evolves, while any newcomer faces insurmountable hurdles in achieving compatibility, security, and speed. Even major tech companies have tried and failed (e.g., Microsoft ditching EdgeHTML for Chromium…
The "weaponization of complexity" as you call it is simply "work is done by those who show up". Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc took the horribly dastardly approach of "participating" and then "doing the work". The horror. Microsoft gave up because it wasn't worth it when someone else was willing to do the work. It was not something that was adding value to them by them doing it themselves anymore. It's hilari…
Every day we get closer to reinventing the Java applet. Again.
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Look at the market share. And look at how much breakage report there is with Firefox vs. Chrome or Safari (not to say the return of "this website works better with Chrome" disclaimers, as if we were back to IE6).
Do you have a source for real world sites broken? It’s extremely rare for me and I exclusively use Safari and Firefox.
It seems most people here are concerned about the readability of web content. Text is already gone with SPAs and React. The only reason we still have an index-able web is because of Google and websites still want to get indexed and ranked. In fact, I'd say Wasm is probably better for text since now you have to provide text in a raw format (ie: JSON) for it to be linked/indexed which is much better than trying to craw…
What do you mean that Text is already gone? SPAs and React render plain HTML.
The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……
This is exactly how Flutter (now) works on web - the browser loads a JS/WASM blob, and your app renders everything to a canvas - and you're right, almost everything you mention is problematic. There is a time and a place for that paradigm, but it's niche. The lack of SEO alone is usually enough to stop it in its tracks.
If not, this sounds like a major oversight, and basically kills accessibility dead in these software and makes testing pretty painful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "weaponization of complexity" is real—modern web standards are an endless labyrinth of APIs, performance optimizations, and security requirements. Large players like Google have the resources to dictate how the web evolves, while any newcomer faces insurmountable hurdles in achieving compatibility, security, and speed. Even major tech companies have tried and failed (e.g., Microsoft ditching EdgeHTML for Chromium…
The "weaponization of complexity" as you call it is simply "work is done by those who show up". Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc took the horribly dastardly approach of "participating" and then "doing the work". The horror. Microsoft gave up because it wasn't worth it when someone else was willing to do the work. It was not something that was adding value to them by them doing it themselves anymore. It's hilari…
No reasonable amount of engineering resources would have made a dent in the problem. What OP is calling "weaponization of complexity" is just the asymmetry of effort required between new comers and entrenched players.
You would have to be naive to think that google would just open their arms and kumbaya with microsoft to do the "hard work"
We have seen this played out in any industry in history. Sometime hard work is not enough and it's easy to abuse dominant position to grid lock a market.
The rest of your post frankly sounds like someone who is drunk on the usual company cooliad.
> The end goal is to help user
No. The end goal is to make money. Sometime it requires helping user, other time a bunch of anti competitive ( forcing android oem to prevent meaningful forks)and anti consumer (like playing hard ball with ad blockers) BS.
>The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity
So much wrong with this. And is just a strawman. OP is not saying that it's not hard problem solving. The point is the solution achieved is self serving and sucks for the rest of us.
> In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.
Yeah no. History disagree with you