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There’s too much potential for abuse in web technologies; it’s past time for web browsers to clearly divide their capabilities into higher-level buckets that ha

There’s too much potential for abuse in web technologies; it’s past time for web browsers to clearly divide their capabilities into higher-level buckets that have restrictions. Two buckets that come to mind: maybe you should have to specify that either you are developing an “app” or you are developing a “page”. And no page should be able to do things like create sticky-elements (not to mention a zillion other capabilities) because we all know some Obnoxious Clueless Ad Company will take about 13 seconds to start ruining your browsing with it. Anything identified as an “app” should be impossible to load in a normal browser, accessible only under a dedicated home-screen icon with a special sandbox, etc.

Kadin 10y ago
I agree, and it seemed like Chrome was aiming for something like that model for a while. But then Google seems to have backed away from it. Except on ChromeOS, Chrome apps are supposed to be phased out by 2018. Personally, I am really unhappy with the direction of the web right now. Ads have gotten more and more intrusive (particularly on mobile), and it seems like every site is doing some sort of shitty "sign up for our newsletter!" or "but wait there's more!" overlay. Blocking and display-control mechanisms have seemingly fallen behind (again, especially on mobile, where for the typical user there's basically no viable ad blocking solution). I've heard web developers defend all of this from a business perspective (we need the ad revenue), but it seems really shortsighted. All it's going to do is drive users to walled-garden apps, probably dominated by one or two big players in each market category, and the friction to get your content or product in front of customers will increase tremendously.
- HappyTypist 10y ago
  On iOS, you can just download a content blocker in the App Store and it'll just work in safari.

Kadin 10y ago

I agree, and it seemed like Chrome was aiming for something like that model for a while. But then Google seems to have backed away from it. Except on ChromeOS, Chrome apps are supposed to be phased out by 2018. Personally, I am really unhappy with the direction of the web right now. Ads have gotten more and more intrusive (particularly on mobile), and it seems like every site is doing some sort of shitty "sign up for our newsletter!" or "but wait there's more!" overlay. Blocking and display-control mechanisms have seemingly fallen behind (again, especially on mobile, where for the typical user there's basically no viable ad blocking solution). I've heard web developers defend all of this from a business perspective (we need the ad revenue), but it seems really shortsighted. All it's going to do is drive users to walled-garden apps, probably dominated by one or two big players in each market category, and the friction to get your content or product in front of customers will increase tremendously.

HappyTypist 10y ago
On iOS, you can just download a content blocker in the App Store and it'll just work in safari.