9 ms·

Browser Bloat (1996)

118 points by laktak 10y ago

nilved 10y ago
The Web is bad and getting worst, not better. I still don't understand why browsers became operating systems.
- fleevy 10y ago
  Follow the money
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    Which in the case of the web to a large degree means "follow the consumer" (of web content, so including firms; and developers so close to consumers to be the same for this purpose).
- nathcd 10y ago
  There are clearly a lot of people that share this sentiment, and sometimes I sort of do too. Is there an answer for those who feel this way? A directory of sites that are pure html, no scripting (and maybe no styles)? a next-gen gopher? RSS? the library? Or maybe there isn't an answer?
  - textmode 10y ago
    If you want to read the web as nicely formatted text, using the same large, easy to read font for every site, it can be done. If you want to browse sites as lists and make selections from lists like you did on gopher, it can be done. I have done a lot of work over the years on this for myself because this is how I prefer to retrieve, store and consume information. I have not run into many roadblocks. All that javascript and CSS really is optional. I rarely use "modern" browsers for accessing the web. I do use them on private LAN's to access local files, but only because smartphones and tablets force you to use them. On the web, I rewrite pages on the fly and view them with a text-only browser. Or I extract the bits I need from pages. In both cases usually I'm using a stream editor/filter, and sometimes a proxy if I'm modifying packets. Sometimes I put the results into csv or text files, kdb+, or cdb. If I want to start using a "modern" browser I can do that any day at any time. The "modern" browser is always there if and when I need it. No learning curve. Beginners always welcome. But to use the web effectively without using those graphical browsers could take practice for the uninitiated. I have practiced this for many years and it has become like second nature.
    - srpeck 10y ago
      This is why I built Reading Mode as a Chrome extension (https://github.com/srpeck/readingmode https://github.com/srpeck/readingmode) - you can switch from modern browser to HTML only.
    - JadeNB 10y ago
      > But to use the web effectively without using those graphical browsers could take practice for the uninitiated. I have practiced this for many years and it has become like second nature. Any tips? I would love to do this, both from my home computer and, all the more so, from my phone.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Could you describe your setup in more detail? I've long used Linux, vim, and w3m for various sorts of tasks, some curl and wget as well. Wget is often blocked by sites unless it spoofs a more common browser agent.) I have similar preferences to you, though of late I'm largely using graphical browsers (Firefox by preference, for flexibility, Chrome unfortunately has better performance, though especially on Android, virtually zero configurability. I've been thinking of scrapping much of this, un-rusting my emacs skills and doing something with: * Emacs. * Buffers. * Built-in browser. * Some local on-disk hierarchy essentially reflecting structure of websites I frequently access. Much of the information I access is actually pretty static, and there's a small subset of what I browse that's actually useful to keep. * Extracting just the usful bits from each page. The primary text content and associated graphics, mostly. Dynamic and interactive components are rare, and there I'll likely hit up a graphical browser, treating it more as an applications environment. * Metadata management. A standardised format of recording at least the site, publication date (if known), author (if known), access date, perceived quality, topic tags or categories (possibly a LoCCS hierarchy -- it's more sane than it seems), and a set of flags for issues (clickbait, bullshit, innacurracy, etc.) All this is shades of Vannevar Bush's Memex, though not a strict interpretation. * A ratings and reputation system. What authors, sites, and publishers are or aren't generally credible or high-quality. * Integrated management of multiple document formats: HTML, PDF, ePub, DJVU, Mobi, text, Markdown. * If possible, a presentation mode that's more similar to Pocket than just a monospace text presentation, though that might also work. * Annotations and notes. * Bibliography generation. Emacs strikes me as likely the perfet tool for much of this, with a bunch of built-in support already, from various modes, browsers, tools, Lisp, org-mode, etc. Just rambling....
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Remember AOL keywords? Facebook pages. Think of how many businesses, groups, etc no longer have websites. They might have a meetup page, but they most definitely have a Facebook Page. If they have a website, it often embeds their Facebook event listing or uses some Wordpress/Drupal plugin to sync it for them. The Internet is more centralized and less distributed than it was in the 1990s.
- api 10y ago
  Browsers became OSes because existing OSes have a poor security model and a very poor application delivery model. The browser offers an alternative way to ship an app to a user without having to go through the pain and suffering of building, testing, and packaging Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. applications for the end user. We know because we do the latter and it hurts. Bad. Especially if you are targeting a wide customer base on multiple platforms. The pain. Mobile OSes are somewhat better in this regard from a technical point of view, but in place of awful technology they have substituted the app store nightmare. I've dealt with both the Apple app store and the IRS, and the latter has far better customer service. This is partly because vendors wanted total control over the "next" platform, and partly because iOS and Android did not actually solve the security aspect of the OS application model. Instead they punted on the problem by deciding to just gate keep all code and to offer a reduced functionality profile to apps. I am not entirely convinced browsers becoming OSes is a bad thing, and I half suspect that the web is actually an incubator for the next real innovation in the OS and platform space. The browser is at least prototyping an OS capable of rapidly loading and executing untrusted code without instantly melting down or being pwned by the first bit of malicious code that comes by. This is big. Try executing code this promiscuously with Windows, Linux, or Mac, or jail-broken Android or iOS for that matter.
  - dcwca 10y ago
    I agree with you completely. The web became an OS because there's a huge demand for cross-platform zero-install software applications that run in a sandbox without dangerous user level access to your machine.
    - jandrese 10y ago
      And if you do need dangerous user or system level access there is always Flash and its everpresent zero days.
      - zwetan 10y ago
        sure there are no browser exploits at all ... Top 50 Products By Total Number Of "Distinct" Vulnerabilities http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php #3 Firefox #4 Chrome #7 Internet Explorer
dTal 10y ago
>A few of the real fringe-dwellers even predicted that Java would cause the end of Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market. Android apps are written in Java. There's still time...
- zeta0134 10y ago
  I wouldn't consider this the end of Microsoft's dominance in the "desktop" market. What's actually happening is that the desktop market is shrinking, and being slowly replaced by smartphones and tablets as the casual computer. I doubt it's going to go away entirely so long as Microsoft continues to sponsor schools with Microsoft Office coursework, but I have a hard time believing that every house is going to continue to need a desktop computer for much longer. My parents can get almost everything they need done on an iPad, and are somewhat annoyed when they stumble on the rare site that makes them walk into the Office and use their computer instead of finishing the task on the couch.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    It's the personal computing market though. Close enough translation.
    - derefr 10y ago
      I'm not so sure. Tablets are personal, certainly, but Microsoft and Sun didn't care so much about the "truly personal" computing market (the market that in the 80s/90s would be translated as "game consoles and PDAs.") Instead, they were after the workstation market: they both wanted to be the platform that businesses wrote their line-of-business Intranet-facing CRUD apps in. Any PC-targeted uses for their platforms were just loss-leaders to win mind-share in the enterprise server+workstation market.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        And that is why Microsoft went all out when Netscape started pushing the intranet idea, because it targeted the platform that MS had built up after they blindsided Novell.
djsumdog 10y ago
Oh the nostalgia! The white board! Cool talk! Man I remember all of that stuff.
zeta0134 10y ago
Well, we're definitely at the point where my Web Browser uses more memory than my Operating System. I'm impressed, a great deal of this talk could be applied to modern browsers with a surprising degree of accuracy. I love looking at the feature list and seeing what actually caught on (Audio Playback) and the laundry list of features that seemed like good ideas at the time, but had no place in the browser. CoolTalk eventually got implemented as VOIP, and chat features showed up on websites once JavaScript got good enough to facilitate it, but nearly everything else has fallen by the wayside.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Well there is webrtc, so the cooltalk idea came back to roost.
- skuunk1 10y ago
  Chromebook user here. The Web Browser IS my Operating System. ;)
  - dijit 10y ago
    I disagree. Your operating system is what allows chrome to be your userland.
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    Isn't Linux under there somewhere?
    - zeta0134 10y ago
      Linux is the kernel. The semantics of this can be argued all day, but the kernel is not the operating system. It is simply the tiny piece of software that allows processes to run and manages memory and hardware access. The operating system is the whole collection of software that allows the User to manage their system. It necessarily includes the kernel, but it is much more than just that one component. I don't consider ChromeOS to be a Linux desktop any more than I consider my Android smartphone to be a Linux desktop, or an iPhone to be a BSD system. They happen to share a kernel, but that's really where the similarities end as an end user.
sonar_un 10y ago
Oh wow, VRML, I totally forgot about that! I still remember trying to find all the VRML sites I could find, in all of it's few polygon glory.
- jandrese 10y ago
  VRML was way ahead of its time. In the bad way, where the technology totally sucks on the machines of the era and people think it's a joke for years afterward. I've been wondering how long it takes till someone reinvents it now that VR goggles are finally starting to become affordable and broadband is common.
  - nnx 10y ago
    It's coming back as WebVR ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVR ) Initiated by the developer who started WebGL.
xeniak 10y ago
This is well juxtaposed with Cast being added natively into Chrome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367
jandrese 10y ago
I don't remember Cooltalk at all. Did it never make it past the Alpha? Did it only ship on Windows? The blurb makes it sound fairly interesting. A built-in IRC client (or maybe ICQ?), VoIP, and a shared whiteboard facility. It really imagines the browser as part of a bidirectional communication system not just a viewer for published content. Knowing the timeframe it probably didn't work through NAT and died as static IPs for residential customers stopped being a thing. NAT broke a lot of promising applications back in the day.
- flomo 10y ago
  If Cooltalk is the same thing I'm thinking about, it took about five minutes to start and absolutely crushed the average PC. Netscape dropped it after a couple point releases. It was Java-based but might have been Windows-only.
windlep 10y ago
> The browser will require more memory than the operating system it runs on. Done! And of course, many apps routinely now take more memory than the OS.
- nine_k 10y ago
  An ideal OS would not require any RAM and CPU resources, making 100% of them available to the applications it runs.
  - Viper007Bond 10y ago
    On the contrary. Ideally you'd be using 80-90% of your RAM at all times. Ever notice that the more RAM you have, the more your computer uses? Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Recent versions of Windows for example cache things into RAM to speed up the loading of frequently accessed applications. If you run low on RAM, then it frees up room as needed.
    - crymer11 10y ago
      I don't think the parent comment/thread was correctly read. The point is that an ideal OS would consume no resources leaving them entirely for the applications to use. The OS caching frequently used applications is different from the OS itself needing resources.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- kazinator 10y ago
  That's been the case for decades. Except in Microsoft land, of course.
- PDoyle 10y ago
  What's strange about that? Applications should be using a computer's resources. That's like declaring that employees now get more of a company's payroll than management.
kazinator 10y ago
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0"> Did Microsoft FP 4.0 exist in 1996? WikiPedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage) says that it was 1.1 in 1996 and 2 in 1997 (also called FrontPage 98). This might not be an original unmodified-since-1996 page. Beautiful page though.
- kr7 10y ago
  As it existed in '97: https://web.archive.org/web/19970226231531/http://www.miken.com/winpost/jun96/bbloat.htm https://web.archive.org/web/19970226231531/http://www.miken.... The GENERATOR tag was added in 2001-2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020624063420/http://miken.com/winpost/jun96/bbloat.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20020624063420/http://miken.com/...
- a012 10y ago
  Might be new page(s) added with new version (4.0) then all pages get modified with new <meta>
wtbob 10y ago
So, Netscape Atlas was 6 megabytes in June 1996; Firefox for Windows 64-bit is 45.2 megabytes today (I picked the Windows download because it sounds like this guy was using Windows back then); that means the size has multiplied by 7.5 over the last twenty years, for an annual increase of about 10½%. That's — not terribly great, actually. OTOH, according to http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm disk prices have been dropping by almost a third every year, with the result that the cost of a Firefox install in 2016 is less than 1/500th the cost of a Netscape install in 1996. That's pretty awesome!
- sitharus 10y ago
  Chrome for Windows on the other hand is 405MB, which is quite an astonishing difference.
  - Viper007Bond 10y ago
    Installed? Or the installer?
    - sitharus 10y ago
      Installed. I'm not counting the update files it keeps on disk either.
  - ddeck 10y ago
    Chrome for Windows also doesn't remove the prior version when updating [1], so you typically have at least two versions on disk. [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/KRGYQbWeqHk https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/KRGYQb...
- flukus 10y ago
  How much of that is purely graphical and other resources though? Like the hi res image on the opening page, all the icons, translations etc. I saw someone do a similar analysis recently about how bloated vim had become but it was mostly documentation (plus translations) and stuff like that, not vim itself.
rbisewski 10y ago
Rather fun read, I must say. It really seems like it makes sense that browsers really "need" the bloat; it has got to the point where it ends up being the most useful and most used application on any OS, for a given section of the end-user base, anyway. At that point can we really call those features bloat? Maybe in 1996 you didn't need to play videos much, but a web browser without HTML 5 can't do what the majority would expect. What users expect from the internet has very much expanded. I actually was curious about some of the inner workings of this stuff and made a browser using WebKit once. https://gitlab.com/ibiscybernetics/sighte https://gitlab.com/ibiscybernetics/sighte All-in-all one of the more unusual side projects I played with.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  > It really seems like it makes sense that browsers really "need" the bloat; it has got to the point where it ends up being the most useful and most used application on any OS, for a given section of the end-user base, anyway. Effectively the browser has in the GUI age become what the terminal emulator was in the CLI age. On its own the browser do jack all. But it allows remote resources to present a local UI. Thus my lowly desktop PC can become a virtual supercomputer.
zwetan 10y ago
and yet 20 years later, the situation is not that better ... each browser vendors is still fighting the other ones by adding features that make their browser the platform of choice like chrome API only available for the chrome app store let's all kill Flash because plugins are bad, but let's not hesitate to add our own plugin, oh excuse me the politically correct word is "addon" as a native extension to cast things around. when CPU, RAM and bandwidth are no more an issues let's cache aggressively everything so that bloated browser does not feel so slow anymore.
- newjersey 10y ago
  Some context for people like me Google cast is built into chrome https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  Modern browser extensions are written in JavaScript, making them portable, verifiable, and easily sandboxed - not something you get with an executable binary blob that until very recently ran in the same permission context as the local user - which on Win9x through XP meant root. Handily (and amusingly), Microsoft's Edge extension API is designed to be compatible with Chrome's - I understand there's a degree of mutual-intelligibility with Firefix too. And aggressive caching just makes sense - consider people today with 10+ Chrome Windows open, all with 50+ tabs each - not even 10 years ago IE6 still ruled supreme - with one document per window. And even then machines had similar orders-of-magnitude of RAM as they do today - my 2006 rig had 4GB of RAM (XPx64) my current machine has 4 times that.
  - nilved 10y ago
    > Modern browser extensions are written in JavaScript, making them portable, verifiable, and easily sandboxed - not something you get with an executable binary blob that until very recently ran in the same permission context as the local user - which on Win9x through XP meant root. Do you think this means that browser extensions are secure in the least?
encoderer 10y ago
I love that they shipped virtual reality markup language before CSS. #priorities
gok 10y ago
Netscape 3.0 was 6MB? So about a cold load of the average news web page in 2016.
- geon 10y ago
  Perhaps says more about the news pages. HN is like 9 kb.

118 points by laktak 10y ago

nilved 10y ago

The Web is bad and getting worst, not better. I still don't understand why browsers became operating systems.

fleevy 10y ago
Follow the money
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Which in the case of the web to a large degree means "follow the consumer" (of web content, so including firms; and developers so close to consumers to be the same for this purpose).
nathcd 10y ago
There are clearly a lot of people that share this sentiment, and sometimes I sort of do too. Is there an answer for those who feel this way? A directory of sites that are pure html, no scripting (and maybe no styles)? a next-gen gopher? RSS? the library? Or maybe there isn't an answer?
- textmode 10y ago
  If you want to read the web as nicely formatted text, using the same large, easy to read font for every site, it can be done. If you want to browse sites as lists and make selections from lists like you did on gopher, it can be done. I have done a lot of work over the years on this for myself because this is how I prefer to retrieve, store and consume information. I have not run into many roadblocks. All that javascript and CSS really is optional. I rarely use "modern" browsers for accessing the web. I do use them on private LAN's to access local files, but only because smartphones and tablets force you to use them. On the web, I rewrite pages on the fly and view them with a text-only browser. Or I extract the bits I need from pages. In both cases usually I'm using a stream editor/filter, and sometimes a proxy if I'm modifying packets. Sometimes I put the results into csv or text files, kdb+, or cdb. If I want to start using a "modern" browser I can do that any day at any time. The "modern" browser is always there if and when I need it. No learning curve. Beginners always welcome. But to use the web effectively without using those graphical browsers could take practice for the uninitiated. I have practiced this for many years and it has become like second nature.
  - srpeck 10y ago
    This is why I built Reading Mode as a Chrome extension (https://github.com/srpeck/readingmode https://github.com/srpeck/readingmode) - you can switch from modern browser to HTML only.
  - JadeNB 10y ago
    > But to use the web effectively without using those graphical browsers could take practice for the uninitiated. I have practiced this for many years and it has become like second nature. Any tips? I would love to do this, both from my home computer and, all the more so, from my phone.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Could you describe your setup in more detail? I've long used Linux, vim, and w3m for various sorts of tasks, some curl and wget as well. Wget is often blocked by sites unless it spoofs a more common browser agent.) I have similar preferences to you, though of late I'm largely using graphical browsers (Firefox by preference, for flexibility, Chrome unfortunately has better performance, though especially on Android, virtually zero configurability. I've been thinking of scrapping much of this, un-rusting my emacs skills and doing something with: * Emacs. * Buffers. * Built-in browser. * Some local on-disk hierarchy essentially reflecting structure of websites I frequently access. Much of the information I access is actually pretty static, and there's a small subset of what I browse that's actually useful to keep. * Extracting just the usful bits from each page. The primary text content and associated graphics, mostly. Dynamic and interactive components are rare, and there I'll likely hit up a graphical browser, treating it more as an applications environment. * Metadata management. A standardised format of recording at least the site, publication date (if known), author (if known), access date, perceived quality, topic tags or categories (possibly a LoCCS hierarchy -- it's more sane than it seems), and a set of flags for issues (clickbait, bullshit, innacurracy, etc.) All this is shades of Vannevar Bush's Memex, though not a strict interpretation. * A ratings and reputation system. What authors, sites, and publishers are or aren't generally credible or high-quality. * Integrated management of multiple document formats: HTML, PDF, ePub, DJVU, Mobi, text, Markdown. * If possible, a presentation mode that's more similar to Pocket than just a monospace text presentation, though that might also work. * Annotations and notes. * Bibliography generation. Emacs strikes me as likely the perfet tool for much of this, with a bunch of built-in support already, from various modes, browsers, tools, Lisp, org-mode, etc. Just rambling....
djsumdog 10y ago
Remember AOL keywords? Facebook pages. Think of how many businesses, groups, etc no longer have websites. They might have a meetup page, but they most definitely have a Facebook Page. If they have a website, it often embeds their Facebook event listing or uses some Wordpress/Drupal plugin to sync it for them. The Internet is more centralized and less distributed than it was in the 1990s.
api 10y ago
Browsers became OSes because existing OSes have a poor security model and a very poor application delivery model. The browser offers an alternative way to ship an app to a user without having to go through the pain and suffering of building, testing, and packaging Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. applications for the end user. We know because we do the latter and it hurts. Bad. Especially if you are targeting a wide customer base on multiple platforms. The pain. Mobile OSes are somewhat better in this regard from a technical point of view, but in place of awful technology they have substituted the app store nightmare. I've dealt with both the Apple app store and the IRS, and the latter has far better customer service. This is partly because vendors wanted total control over the "next" platform, and partly because iOS and Android did not actually solve the security aspect of the OS application model. Instead they punted on the problem by deciding to just gate keep all code and to offer a reduced functionality profile to apps. I am not entirely convinced browsers becoming OSes is a bad thing, and I half suspect that the web is actually an incubator for the next real innovation in the OS and platform space. The browser is at least prototyping an OS capable of rapidly loading and executing untrusted code without instantly melting down or being pwned by the first bit of malicious code that comes by. This is big. Try executing code this promiscuously with Windows, Linux, or Mac, or jail-broken Android or iOS for that matter.
- dcwca 10y ago
  I agree with you completely. The web became an OS because there's a huge demand for cross-platform zero-install software applications that run in a sandbox without dangerous user level access to your machine.
  - jandrese 10y ago
    And if you do need dangerous user or system level access there is always Flash and its everpresent zero days.
    - zwetan 10y ago
      sure there are no browser exploits at all ... Top 50 Products By Total Number Of "Distinct" Vulnerabilities http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php #3 Firefox #4 Chrome #7 Internet Explorer

dTal 10y ago

>A few of the real fringe-dwellers even predicted that Java would cause the end of Microsoft's dominance of the desktop market. Android apps are written in Java. There's still time...

zeta0134 10y ago
I wouldn't consider this the end of Microsoft's dominance in the "desktop" market. What's actually happening is that the desktop market is shrinking, and being slowly replaced by smartphones and tablets as the casual computer. I doubt it's going to go away entirely so long as Microsoft continues to sponsor schools with Microsoft Office coursework, but I have a hard time believing that every house is going to continue to need a desktop computer for much longer. My parents can get almost everything they need done on an iPad, and are somewhat annoyed when they stumble on the rare site that makes them walk into the Office and use their computer instead of finishing the task on the couch.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  It's the personal computing market though. Close enough translation.
  - derefr 10y ago
    I'm not so sure. Tablets are personal, certainly, but Microsoft and Sun didn't care so much about the "truly personal" computing market (the market that in the 80s/90s would be translated as "game consoles and PDAs.") Instead, they were after the workstation market: they both wanted to be the platform that businesses wrote their line-of-business Intranet-facing CRUD apps in. Any PC-targeted uses for their platforms were just loss-leaders to win mind-share in the enterprise server+workstation market.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      And that is why Microsoft went all out when Netscape started pushing the intranet idea, because it targeted the platform that MS had built up after they blindsided Novell.

djsumdog 10y ago

Oh the nostalgia! The white board! Cool talk! Man I remember all of that stuff.

zeta0134 10y ago

Well, we're definitely at the point where my Web Browser uses more memory than my Operating System. I'm impressed, a great deal of this talk could be applied to modern browsers with a surprising degree of accuracy. I love looking at the feature list and seeing what actually caught on (Audio Playback) and the laundry list of features that seemed like good ideas at the time, but had no place in the browser. CoolTalk eventually got implemented as VOIP, and chat features showed up on websites once JavaScript got good enough to facilitate it, but nearly everything else has fallen by the wayside.

digi_owl 10y ago
Well there is webrtc, so the cooltalk idea came back to roost.
skuunk1 10y ago
Chromebook user here. The Web Browser IS my Operating System. ;)
- dijit 10y ago
  I disagree. Your operating system is what allows chrome to be your userland.
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  Isn't Linux under there somewhere?
  - zeta0134 10y ago
    Linux is the kernel. The semantics of this can be argued all day, but the kernel is not the operating system. It is simply the tiny piece of software that allows processes to run and manages memory and hardware access. The operating system is the whole collection of software that allows the User to manage their system. It necessarily includes the kernel, but it is much more than just that one component. I don't consider ChromeOS to be a Linux desktop any more than I consider my Android smartphone to be a Linux desktop, or an iPhone to be a BSD system. They happen to share a kernel, but that's really where the similarities end as an end user.

sonar_un 10y ago

Oh wow, VRML, I totally forgot about that! I still remember trying to find all the VRML sites I could find, in all of it's few polygon glory.

jandrese 10y ago
VRML was way ahead of its time. In the bad way, where the technology totally sucks on the machines of the era and people think it's a joke for years afterward. I've been wondering how long it takes till someone reinvents it now that VR goggles are finally starting to become affordable and broadband is common.
- nnx 10y ago
  It's coming back as WebVR ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVR ) Initiated by the developer who started WebGL.

xeniak 10y ago

This is well juxtaposed with Cast being added natively into Chrome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367

jandrese 10y ago

I don't remember Cooltalk at all. Did it never make it past the Alpha? Did it only ship on Windows? The blurb makes it sound fairly interesting. A built-in IRC client (or maybe ICQ?), VoIP, and a shared whiteboard facility. It really imagines the browser as part of a bidirectional communication system not just a viewer for published content. Knowing the timeframe it probably didn't work through NAT and died as static IPs for residential customers stopped being a thing. NAT broke a lot of promising applications back in the day.

flomo 10y ago
If Cooltalk is the same thing I'm thinking about, it took about five minutes to start and absolutely crushed the average PC. Netscape dropped it after a couple point releases. It was Java-based but might have been Windows-only.

windlep 10y ago

> The browser will require more memory than the operating system it runs on. Done! And of course, many apps routinely now take more memory than the OS.

nine_k 10y ago
An ideal OS would not require any RAM and CPU resources, making 100% of them available to the applications it runs.
- Viper007Bond 10y ago
  On the contrary. Ideally you'd be using 80-90% of your RAM at all times. Ever notice that the more RAM you have, the more your computer uses? Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Recent versions of Windows for example cache things into RAM to speed up the loading of frequently accessed applications. If you run low on RAM, then it frees up room as needed.
  - crymer11 10y ago
    I don't think the parent comment/thread was correctly read. The point is that an ideal OS would consume no resources leaving them entirely for the applications to use. The OS caching frequently used applications is different from the OS itself needing resources.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
kazinator 10y ago
That's been the case for decades. Except in Microsoft land, of course.
PDoyle 10y ago
What's strange about that? Applications should be using a computer's resources. That's like declaring that employees now get more of a company's payroll than management.

kazinator 10y ago

kr7 10y ago
As it existed in '97: https://web.archive.org/web/19970226231531/http://www.miken.com/winpost/jun96/bbloat.htm https://web.archive.org/web/19970226231531/http://www.miken.... The GENERATOR tag was added in 2001-2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020624063420/http://miken.com/winpost/jun96/bbloat.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20020624063420/http://miken.com/...
a012 10y ago
Might be new page(s) added with new version (4.0) then all pages get modified with new <meta>

wtbob 10y ago

So, Netscape Atlas was 6 megabytes in June 1996; Firefox for Windows 64-bit is 45.2 megabytes today (I picked the Windows download because it sounds like this guy was using Windows back then); that means the size has multiplied by 7.5 over the last twenty years, for an annual increase of about 10½%. That's — not terribly great, actually. OTOH, according to http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm disk prices have been dropping by almost a third every year, with the result that the cost of a Firefox install in 2016 is less than 1/500th the cost of a Netscape install in 1996. That's pretty awesome!

sitharus 10y ago
Chrome for Windows on the other hand is 405MB, which is quite an astonishing difference.
- Viper007Bond 10y ago
  Installed? Or the installer?
  - sitharus 10y ago
    Installed. I'm not counting the update files it keeps on disk either.
- ddeck 10y ago
  Chrome for Windows also doesn't remove the prior version when updating [1], so you typically have at least two versions on disk. [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/KRGYQbWeqHk https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/KRGYQb...
flukus 10y ago
How much of that is purely graphical and other resources though? Like the hi res image on the opening page, all the icons, translations etc. I saw someone do a similar analysis recently about how bloated vim had become but it was mostly documentation (plus translations) and stuff like that, not vim itself.

rbisewski 10y ago

Rather fun read, I must say. It really seems like it makes sense that browsers really "need" the bloat; it has got to the point where it ends up being the most useful and most used application on any OS, for a given section of the end-user base, anyway. At that point can we really call those features bloat? Maybe in 1996 you didn't need to play videos much, but a web browser without HTML 5 can't do what the majority would expect. What users expect from the internet has very much expanded. I actually was curious about some of the inner workings of this stuff and made a browser using WebKit once. https://gitlab.com/ibiscybernetics/sighte https://gitlab.com/ibiscybernetics/sighte All-in-all one of the more unusual side projects I played with.

digi_owl 10y ago
> It really seems like it makes sense that browsers really "need" the bloat; it has got to the point where it ends up being the most useful and most used application on any OS, for a given section of the end-user base, anyway. Effectively the browser has in the GUI age become what the terminal emulator was in the CLI age. On its own the browser do jack all. But it allows remote resources to present a local UI. Thus my lowly desktop PC can become a virtual supercomputer.

zwetan 10y ago

and yet 20 years later, the situation is not that better ... each browser vendors is still fighting the other ones by adding features that make their browser the platform of choice like chrome API only available for the chrome app store let's all kill Flash because plugins are bad, but let's not hesitate to add our own plugin, oh excuse me the politically correct word is "addon" as a native extension to cast things around. when CPU, RAM and bandwidth are no more an issues let's cache aggressively everything so that bloated browser does not feel so slow anymore.

newjersey 10y ago
Some context for people like me Google cast is built into chrome https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12383367
DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
Modern browser extensions are written in JavaScript, making them portable, verifiable, and easily sandboxed - not something you get with an executable binary blob that until very recently ran in the same permission context as the local user - which on Win9x through XP meant root. Handily (and amusingly), Microsoft's Edge extension API is designed to be compatible with Chrome's - I understand there's a degree of mutual-intelligibility with Firefix too. And aggressive caching just makes sense - consider people today with 10+ Chrome Windows open, all with 50+ tabs each - not even 10 years ago IE6 still ruled supreme - with one document per window. And even then machines had similar orders-of-magnitude of RAM as they do today - my 2006 rig had 4GB of RAM (XPx64) my current machine has 4 times that.
- nilved 10y ago
  > Modern browser extensions are written in JavaScript, making them portable, verifiable, and easily sandboxed - not something you get with an executable binary blob that until very recently ran in the same permission context as the local user - which on Win9x through XP meant root. Do you think this means that browser extensions are secure in the least?

encoderer 10y ago

I love that they shipped virtual reality markup language before CSS. #priorities

gok 10y ago

Netscape 3.0 was 6MB? So about a cold load of the average news web page in 2016.

geon 10y ago
Perhaps says more about the news pages. HN is like 9 kb.