83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites • Hacker News Board

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#31

Post by nwah1 » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

btrask wrote: post #29

jbob2000 wrote: post #8

Kind of a silly article. Most top websites just serve static content with tons of ad-network crap, they would never need 83% of the features. This is like saying "the most sold vehicles in the world don't use 90% of the horsepower they have". No shit, the most sold vehicles in the world are Corollas and Civics, ie. "sit in traffic and commute" type cars. It doesn't cost anything to keep these features around, why kil…

With fewer features, new engines like Servo could be built faster.

And features add attack surface. But since people seem to want web rendering engines to replace operating systems, there's no way around it. You need WebBluetooth, WebRTC, WebAssembly and every other feature.

There's some good reasons to want this, in fact.

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#32

Post by sliverstorm » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

nwah1 wrote: post #31

btrask wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With fewer features, new engines like Servo could be built faster.

And features add attack surface. But since people seem to want web rendering engines to replace operating systems, there's no way around it. You need WebBluetooth, WebRTC, WebAssembly and every other feature. There's some good reasons to want this, in fact.

Don't forget WebBIOS and WebHPC

Edit: those were meant to be satirical, but apparently exist.

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#33

Post by marssaxman » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

reicher89 wrote: post #5

pavel_lishin wrote: post #2

> ALS, “ambient light events”, would let browsers respond to the light level the laptop, phone or desktop is exposed to if anybody used it. Can someone give me a good, non-gimmicky example of what this would be used for?

Hmm, perhaps a text-heavy site could switch between "night" and "day" modes for ease of reading

Oh god. No no no. I cannot hate this idea hard enough to overcome my fear that someday this kind of thing might actually happen! This would be the browser's job, under user control, not ever the site's job. My computer, my choice, no you don't get to decide that for me just because you are a web page designer.

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#34

Post by vonklaus » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:13 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #27

vonklaus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know this to be true, but my assumption as someone not building the interpreter/vms for JS is that if you eliminated all of that shit you could probably get a much better optimization from your engine. ALso, security was touched on above.

APIs have nothing to do with the interpreting of the language.

Sure, but presumably a browser and the codebase has to support all of the apis and the entire specification. Would it not be able to optimize a browser if say, as the article claims, olnly ~17% of the features/apis need to be supported? Or would this totally not matter.

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#35

Post by zghst » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:13 PM UTC

benologist wrote: post #19

pavel_lishin wrote: post #2

> ALS, “ambient light events”, would let browsers respond to the light level the laptop, phone or desktop is exposed to if anybody used it. Can someone give me a good, non-gimmicky example of what this would be used for?

Do you need an example right now or can you wait until someone does something cool with it that's only enabled because the option exists? If we stopped adding new capabilities to JavaScript even as new sensors and w/e go mainstream we'd start needing Flash all over again.

Before we add any new APIs we need a permissions interface for the web. Many new APIs add creepy data points that the user be aware that they are providing.

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#36

Post by gene-h » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #2

> ALS, “ambient light events”, would let browsers respond to the light level the laptop, phone or desktop is exposed to if anybody used it. Can someone give me a good, non-gimmicky example of what this would be used for?

Provided one can access sensor data fast enough, cross device tracking[0]. Display an ad that lights up the room in such a way that you can read it with the sensor. Communication across an airgap. If you have two devices with screens and said sensors in a dark room, they might be able to communicate by turning screens on and off.

Most speculatively, imaging the environment with compressive imaging[1]. One might be able to flash some patterns on the screen and look at light sensor output to take a picture.

Giving web browsers access to sensors on our devices is sort of scary.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-tha... [1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.7181.pdf

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#37

Post by the8472 » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:27 PM UTC

nwah1 wrote: post #31

btrask wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With fewer features, new engines like Servo could be built faster.

And features add attack surface. But since people seem to want web rendering engines to replace operating systems, there's no way around it. You need WebBluetooth, WebRTC, WebAssembly and every other feature. There's some good reasons to want this, in fact.

Or stuff each origin into a container and provide access to libc.

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#38

Post by vonklaus » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:29 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #22

vonklaus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the point. If a feature wasn't great enough to inspire 1 out of 20 developers to experiment with it, then I don't think it makes sense.

1. Retrocompatibility. It's impossible to assume that 99% of the users are using a modern browser with under 3 years. 2. We are not talking about experimentation , we are talking about deployment into production.

I agree with you. I was certainly t aggressive in time frame, but I still agree with the sentiment. We shouldn't have failed decade old features in a browser. As to point 1, you are correct and this is certainly true, however I wish it werent. I assume everyone on hacker news has either gone to college or is aware that a presedential term is 4 years long. Consider how much you as person changed in those 4 years, consider how much the world changed during a 4 year presedential term. China as a country sets guidance for itself, directly for its billion people, and indirectly for the rest of the world, on a rolling 5 yeat basis. I would like to challenge users (and enerprises) to upgrade their browsers over this timeframe and spend the multitude of seconds this takes them to not only increase their own well being, but the well being of developers writing the software they consume.

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#39

Post by matthewmacleod » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:40 PM UTC

reicher89 wrote: post #3

this was very interesting: "SVG, for example, has a problem however you look at it: on one hand more than 15 per cent of the sites use it, on the other hand, nearly 87 per cent of blockers block it, but it's had 14 security warnings (CVEs, Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) in the last three years."

I am deeply suspicious of that number. I've never encountered a plugin or anything of the sort that provides for "blocking SVG", and it's fully supported in all recent browsers.

Re: 83% of browser features are used by under 1% of top websites

#40

Post by TheCowboy » Tue, May 24, 2016, 6:54 PM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #33

reicher89 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, perhaps a text-heavy site could switch between "night" and "day" modes for ease of reading

Oh god. No no no. I cannot hate this idea hard enough to overcome my fear that someday this kind of thing might actually happen! This would be the browser's job, under user control, not ever the site's job. My computer, my choice, no you don't get to decide that for me just because you are a web page designer.

It's difficult to pull this off with every website and keep it readable, without any hint from the site. This is why we have CSS for different screen sizes, rather than relying on mobile browsers to make all the decisions, along with an option to view the site in "desktop mode". I do agree that it would be annoying if sites made this decision for users.

But I think the more promising use for this could be enabling aesthetically pleasing color palettes that are power consumption optimized. Picture a HN that switches to darker tones of the current colors when you're on a mobile device.