I can't read this plaintext in a mobile browser window so clearly there's some work left to do. Or maybe they've done too much work. Who knows.
Reader mode in safari worked OKish for me.
When will web browsers be complete?
61–70 of 213 posts
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#62"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.
Cars don't suffer feature creep. We've optimised them - removed the horse, switched to steel construction, added electrical subsystem - but really there's been no major functional change in cars, ever.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see a freedom or accountability difference between native apps from an appstore and webapps from a webserver.
It's very simple. One requires the good graces of an unaccountable and opaque corporate review process. The other requires nothing more than a simple webserver using open standards hosted anywhere in the world.
Hosted at an IP that can be blocked, over a protocol (HTTP/3, QUIC) so complex and opaque that almost no F/OSS implementation exists, and takes away transparency over regular DNS resolution, that is.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#64When 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…
You literally couldn't have used the web much earlier than 1994 unless you were running a NeXT machine. I know because I've been on the net since 1988 and 1994 was when I first started browsing the web. If you were on Windows it was tricky then as you had to download and configure your own tcp/ip stack. That was possible due to the ingenuity of Peter Tattam who sold software that let you do that. I met him back then…
That's a bit of a stretch. The web is hard to date, 1990 is often mentioned, but it had already spread quite a bit by 1994.
Of course there's a wikipedia article on this, which counts 10k+ web sites at the end of that year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
For most applications you would dial up a remote system anyway so many used the web by way of plain terminal software. The Lynx web browser had existed for just over two years by then and it wasn't the first web client.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft makes a browser but the point people are typically making here is that Edge is just a reskin of Chromium.
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.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very simple. One requires the good graces of an unaccountable and opaque corporate review process. The other requires nothing more than a simple webserver using open standards hosted anywhere in the world.
Hosted at an IP that can be blocked, over a protocol (HTTP/3, QUIC) so complex and opaque that almost no F/OSS implementation exists, and takes away transparency over regular DNS resolution, that is.
The play around control of DNS infrastructure is an interesting one, and it will be exciting to see how that plays out over the coming decade.
Should a trifecta of corporates control resolution, it would be only natural for alternative roots. Over a certain market penetration threshold this could form a perfect moat. Everything that made AlterNIC and its ilk fail is irrelevant now.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#67This seemed a key point:
> We can logically follow this to a future of a "split Web". There's going to be the "Google Era" Web that will live for a long time, and another iteration of the Web where us technologists will try our best to create something more to our liking.
All human endeavors tend toward Towers of Babel. Alternates shall arise and topple Google.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#68"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…
Physics are not changing, it's our understanding of physics that changes, and yes we are very far from understanding them correctly.
The real questions are:
- For how long do we have energy to keep not understanding things.
- Are the understandings leading to real improvements or just more total energy consumption (for every energy reduction there is an equal or more increase in total energy consumption)?
I'm commited to changing to a Raspberry 4 as my main computer with Raspbian (now called RaspberryOS, is that an improvement though) and Chromium before the year is over.
I wish new standards would consider all the effects before releasing, so we can stop reimplementing the wheel and actually build a bike at some point.
Reinventing the wheel for the browser has more or less stalled at this point, and it's sad because I'm all for that: http://move.rupy.se/file/wheel.jpg
Software really worked ok back in the C64 days too, the only real improvement since then is 3D and my position is that OpenGL (ES) 3 with VAO is good enough.
But you are welcome to use Vulkan, Metal and DirectX 12 if you want!
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#69The 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 proce…
Incomplete compared to what?
There are no hard dependencies between web sites and links fail all the time. The web didn't succeed in spite of this, but because of this.
The decision to use one-directional links was a good design choice in retrospect. It has also kept the web agile enough to keep evolving.
Re: When will web browsers be complete?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
If chrome advances it does not matter. The lowest common denominator would be safari specifically ios safari. Until it adopts we would have to code to it's standard.
Safari only matters in 10% of the world, plenty of countries don't need to worry with customers using Safari, as no one uses any kind of Apple product and those companies have more than enough to do with their local markets.
10% is still a big big big number. You can't ignore it. When website fails on someones safari you can't just say we did not consider anyone using safari or iphone. You always try to make it work on most browsers.