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When will web browsers be complete?

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Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#201

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

pgt wrote: post #157
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…

Standards are just out-of-date documentation.

They're more like a proposed specification.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#202

Post by mattl »

bluGill wrote: post #197
mattl wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is why gnome existed (now it is large enough to have a place), but a completely different issue from the corba one.

GNU Harmony and GNU NOME are two different projects from around the same time.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#203

Post by akrymski »

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 in order to emulate an application?

New web browser engines are now impossible to implement due to the sheer size of specs. Surely we are nearing the end game?

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#204

Post by Jyaif »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #179

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 .. b…

> web browser needs a rewrite with thin web specs

Flutter was started by Chrome engineers asking the question "what would the web look like if we could strip out all the things that makes it slow without worrying about breaking compatibility?"

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#205

Post by oscargrouch »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #200
oscargrouch wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are interested in those properties, you might like something i'm working on that i'm about to launch. Its nothing like COM, but a vision of what moderns browsers engines could turn into (focusing on the properties you have mentioned). We should not let "them" dictate dumb clients (and apps) to us that consume from the fog that "the cloud" is. This is a corporate trend that will take a lot of freedom from us, a…

I'm interested. Please, tell us more, and/or drop me an email (address in profile).

Good. Will drop you an email.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#206

Post by ktpsns »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #161
ktpsns wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is so much on TLS beyond Let's Encrypt. For instance, TLS allows user certificates to authenticate the user, not the server. This works a bit like SSH passwordless login (thanks to key authentication). This technique only works if the site operator also controls a CA which the browser accepts. Companies can easily install self-signed certs to do so, but on the wild web that's quite difficult.

So yeah, even today there are use cases for custom CAs.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#208

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ktpsns wrote: post #206
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is so much on TLS beyond Let's Encrypt. For instance, TLS allows user certificates to authenticate the user, not the server. This works a bit like SSH passwordless login (thanks to key authentication). This technique only works if the site operator also controls a CA which the browser accepts. Companies can easily install self-signed certs to do so, but on the wild web that's quite difficult. So yeah, even toda…

I'm aware that client certificates exist. I'm not aware of anyone actually using them.

It also doesn't really have the problem of "unapproved" sites. You are already installing a certificate on the client. It's no extra work to add another trusted CA at the same time.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#209

Post by gsnedders »

Gaelan wrote: post #65
err4nt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between IE and the current Chromium-based Edge browser, was born, lived, and died another browser engine named EdgeHTML. IE was 2 browser families ago from Microsoft.

I thought EdgeHTML was just Trident with some legacy code ripped out. Edit: admittedly, "just" is probably underselling it a bit, but it's still a far cry from a completely new engine.

It was very much a fork of Trident, yes. I believe there was significant refactoring done after the legacy code was ripped out.

Re: When will web browsers be complete?

#210

Post by jupp0r »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #45
jupp0r wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? You could make the same point about engineering, literature, the arts, sociology, ... you get the idea.

I'm not getting the idea. The argument, as I understand it, was that a browser should aspire to be a standardized and relatively simple app enabling a large variety of backends to deliver content, not a never-ending "social experiment" to become overwhelmed by a single party extracting almost all value off the web, and becoming the only party with the resources to implement browsers.

The notion that the world wide web is "finished" at some point is just flawed. Today we do video conferencing, 3D gaming, biometric authentication, photo editing and all sorts of other things on the web. Browsers will evolve along the lines of users needs and developers innovation. If this stops at some point, they will become the new Gopher and something else will come along to replace them.
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