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WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

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Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#181

Post by aredox »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #146
aredox wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is ladybug's marketshare? Does it work flawlessly with "This webpage works better with Chrome" webpages? It is not even mentioned on https://caniuse.com/?search=web%20components

What's internet explorer's market share? Answer: way less than a percent at this point because current market shares are no guarantee about future ones. Chrome is the new Internet Explorer. It successfully replaced it. Only to start sharing most of the qualities that were the reason for Internet Explorer to fail in the market. And there was a web before Internet Explorer as well. Chrome once started at 0% market shar…

>Displacing the dominant browser has been done before. It can be done again.

Why? You skim over all the things that make the present and the future different from the past. The size of the audience is not the same, the size of companies and engineering teams is not the same, the hatred against Microsft was always sky-high... It is not the same battle , it is not even the same battlefield.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#182

Post by johnecheck »

johnecheck wrote: post #166
johnisgood wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant it as an user.

Fair. If that's the deciding factor on whether you use a computer program, that's your prerogative. I assume, then, that every app on your phone allows you to select every bit of text in it?

Cool. Was hoping to discuss the different expectations we have for a program obtained through a web browser than one obtained through an app store, but I guess downvoting is easier. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#183

Post by rafaelmn »

chrismorgan wrote: post #64
nmfisher wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Flutter even had a DOM renderer which should in theory have fixed approximately all the issues (I don’t know for sure, I never knowingly encountered anything using it), but they’ve killed it off fairly recently, doubling down on the fundamentally unfixable direction that is the pure-canvas approach.

Flutter is unique because it is a cross platform canvas renderer with huge number of components built on top. Sort of, there are libs like QT but nobody wants to deal with C++ for GUI apps, and even the bindings leak C++isms last time I checked.

Rendering Flutter to DOM sounds like a huge effort bound to fail on some level - just use React and React native if you are leaning in that direction. Im sure Flutter can add some shims to get basic stuff like navigation working to be more web like.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#184

Post by pjmlp »

zfg wrote: post #178
pjmlp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That man closed the Apple ecosystem doors on Flash, naturally he was not alone, he had an horde of followers. It remains to be seen how much royalty free Chrome remains, Web is now ChromeOS, with exception of a little Gaulish village called iOS.

> That man closed the Apple ecosystem doors on Flash Which is exactly the point, isn't it. Adobe's business model around Flash was so fragile that he could do it. He couldn't do it to the web.

Ever heard about all those ChromeOS features that Safari is not supporting and how PWAs are a failure?

How is that WebGL 2.0 experience going on iOS?

Ever wondered why after a decade there is hardly any WebGL game that can match any serious game done with OpenGL ES.3.0 on mobile phones, starting with the famous Infinity Blade?

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#185

Post by dormento »

I wonder how much of the W3 standards one could ignore and end up with a functionally useful web browser. Technically you do not need javascript to create say a checkout flow, though you'd need TLS...

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#186

Post by wat10000 »

johnecheck wrote: post #173
wat10000 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm painfully aware. Modern apps are mostly terrible. I don't know or care what apps would match on Windows. I don't use Windows. On the systems I do use, I want apps to look like they fit in.

I've never understood this "every program on my device should look like the same company designed it" mentality. Nothing against using the pre-built ui components provided by the OS, but looking down on a developer that decides to use something else? Just weird to me. A checkbox is a checkbox, it really doesn't matter whether App A's checkboxes look identical to App B. Now, if App A's checkboxes look different than A…

Having things look the same makes everything easier to use. I know exactly what's clickable and what happens when I click them, instead of having to figure it out each time.

I don't understand why you'd be annoyed at different checkboxes within an app but not at different checkboxes between apps. Do you only ever use a single app? I constantly switch between many apps.

More importantly, having things behave the same makes everything much easier to use. If your checkboxes don't work the same way as the standard ones (and yes, this is a thing that happens) then that's a problem.

In addition to intentional behavior differences, you also have bugs. For an example close to my heart, Slack often loses its mind and destroys my input when I try to use the Undo functionality. This sort of bug would be impossible if they just used the standard UI widgets built into the OS, because the OS's widgets have competently implemented undo.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#187

Post by bloppe »

jfoster wrote: post #170
berkes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI might be heading towards a situation where you can "tell it to build a full featured browser". But this narrative is naive at best, and frankly, getting annoying too. Especially because it gets repeated by people who know even less about "programming" than those who start this idea in the first place. That AI cannot maintain this browser. It cannot monitor and fix performance issues. It won't be able to refactor s…

What is the fundamental limitation that prevents AI from ever doing the maintenance tasks that you mentioned? Current AI cannot, of course, but the trajectory seems to be that it will be able to do such things better & faster than any human can.

The trajectory actually seems to be plateauing already. OAI is struggling mightily to improve GPT enough to call it 5.0 and te struggles will only get harder as the number gets higher

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#188

Post by bloppe »

neuroelectron wrote: post #22
jillesvangurp wrote: post #9

> So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2 again. Best case. What a situation. The premise of this article seems completely wrong. Chromium, S…

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…

Clearly this is a common sentiment, but none of the comments on this post seem to provide any evidence of it. The W3C has hundreds of members. Does Google really sideline them all? Are there specific examples where Google strong-armed the others to develop self serving standards? I'm not talking about Topics API, because that's not a standard. AFAICT all of Google's sketchy chrome features have never affected me as a happy Firefox user.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#189

Post by kevmoo1 »

Narretz wrote: post #139
nmfisher wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, they still render to canvas? That's terrible. Just looked at this website: https://payamzahedi.com/toastification/ Feels janky just when scrolling. This is supposed to be the future? Last time I used a flutter app they didn't even update the url for different screens.

It's using a Flutter web build that's over 2 years old. We've gotten a LOT better.

Context: I'm a product manager on the team.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#190

Post by Apocryphon »

eadmund wrote: post #99
JimDabell wrote: post #36

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……

The difference between now and then is that people back then wanted bookmarks, search engines, CLIs, user preferences, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links and so forth. While some of us still do, the great mass of web users now just want TV on their smartphones: they want an attention-consumption device to distract t…

Ajax, not even once
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