"When will operating systems be complete?"
"When will car technology be complete?"
...
The answer is they wont be in short term, and they will be made obsolete in the long term.
When will web browsers be complete?
31–40 of 213 posts
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alternative is an internet completely locked down in native apps in proprietary and unaccountable app stores. I'll take a bloated web browser over a corporate monoculture any day.
Sorry which is which? Because right now Chrome engine has more control of the web then IE did in it's heyday when Microsoft was ruled to be a monopoly.
Sorry, that's just wrong. Non-IE browsers had less than 5% market share at its peak. Non-Chrome browsers have more than 6 times that (~30%). And web standards are developed much more collaboratively these days, with less unilateral action.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#33I've seen the same cycle happen repeatedly in tech (there are many cycles, but this is one of them): systems are centralised on a server, then the client gets more powerful and features of the system are pushed to the client. This gets too much and the client slows down, so the features are centralised to a server again.
I can easily see a world where Chrome/ium becomes too bloated to work well, and a "new web" of thin, light, browsers with drastically reduced features but increased speed appears. They'll work with "fat web" servers but throw away half the features (so we'll end up designing two versions of each website).
Eventually most of the functionality of the old "fat web" will migrate across - obeying the 90/10 rule (the 10% of features that provide 90% of the value). With 90% of the value, plus increased speed, everyone will move to "thin web" browsers. Chrome/ium will be left where ActiveX is now - some non-bleeding-edge organisations will use it because it has features that didn't make it to the "thin web" and replacing it is a pain, but it's obsolete and no-one really uses it.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#34I've seen the same cycle happen repeatedly in tech (there are many cycles, but this is one of them): systems are centralised on a server, then the client gets more powerful and features of the system are pushed to the client. This gets too much and the client slows down, so the features are centralised to a server again. I can easily see a world where Chrome/ium becomes too bloated to work well, and a "new web" of th…
Stadia is a great example of this
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#35The HTML/web model is still fundamentally incomplete. Links are one way, things don't flow based on concept but based on this clunky chunk called a page. We still only have one functional semantic for cross linking the clunky chunks called the hyperlink.
The only way we have to find things are to use companies that have managed to visit and index all the sites, not through some search and index interface but by processing the page that the human sees and then trying to rank them making the web ultimately heavily centralized.
Then there is the authorship meta layer that doesn't exist to interleave content from the same author, say by email or some other identifier. Instead we've centralized that into temporal structures that vanish when you look back, like in a dream in a "let 1000 flowers bloom" method where all you ever end up with are just a bunch of silly flowers.
Then there is the permanence feature where the internet is like a river that's always moving. Someone else has to rely on generosity to yet again, centralize the historicals so hopefully things can exist at least as long as bad ink on terrible paper. Otherwise a couple generations of thought will be in metal garbage heaps
I could have written all this, word for word in 1993 but instead it's 2020,
Honestly, I'd say solutions to 70% of the fundamental problems are still unsolved nearly 30 years later.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry which is which? Because right now Chrome engine has more control of the web then IE did in it's heyday when Microsoft was ruled to be a monopoly.
Are you aware that Blink, Webkit and V8 are all open source?
With most people working out of Apple, Microsoft and Google salaries, good luck getting a bunch of random weekend coders to pick up and counterattack an alternative browser based on that open source.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#37> there is not much more distance to cover [relative to native toolkits] As I see it, the web as originally conceived was "ready" around 2003, and then again around 2009 when CSS media queries became mainstream to adapt to mobile usage. For me, the excessive push for browser APIs as a desktop replacement since then, and the proliferation of frameworks is a generational thing, driven not by technology but by big data,…
The alternative is an internet completely locked down in native apps in proprietary and unaccountable app stores. I'll take a bloated web browser over a corporate monoculture any day.
I don't see a freedom or accountability difference between native apps from an appstore and webapps from a webserver.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#38Chrome OS being open source is not a threat to Google for several reasons: The usefulness of the browser is that it's a cross-platform platform. You can run the same web apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, even mobile devices. Turning the browser itself into an OS-level platform will just create another platform that will need to compete with all existing platforms while having nothing unique to offer – after all, the same…
With the Chrome monoculture, the Web is effectively ChromeOS nowadays, specially with the increasing amount of APIs that are Chrome only, which although other browsers refuse to implement really doesn't matter as their market share keeps decreasing towards zero.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#39"There is not much left for a Web browser to cover" - this reminded me of the famous "physics is mostly complete at this point." Web (browser) is the only cross-platform operating system, even if some standards say otherwise. I'm sure we'll see docker-style virtual web environments, cross-machine abstractions to simulate datacenters for distributed computing (GPU and such), PWA-style webapps bootable from USB sticks…
The fact that we're comparing a type of software to a school of science speaks volumes
Is it? You could make the same point about engineering, literature, the arts, sociology, ... you get the idea.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#40When this essay started with "As someone who has used the Web since 2007" I immediately felt old, so thanks for that. As someone who has been using the Web since 1994 (and I feel like I was late to the game), I can assure the author their perspective has a lot of recency bias and this isn't something to worry about, in the general sense. Or worry about it, because it already happened a while ago. Take your pick. Loca…
In 20 years it will be impossible to manually browse to an unapproved "unsafe" URL in a general purpose browser.