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There is a path forward: Just dropping support. The web as a platform has done this before for things like ActiveX, Java applets, and most recently Flash. Coll
by ForHackernews 7y ago
There is a path forward: Just dropping support.
The web as a platform has done this before for things like ActiveX, Java applets, and most recently Flash. Collectively, developers decided they were overcomplicated rubbish and abandoned them.
- avmich 7y agoThanks. So, practically, developers can move capabilities deemed non-essential into plugins, which are more problematic to install, so end users would apply pressure to site authors to avoid certain technologies. Hm. History says it can work.
- shadowgovt 7y agoThat fails to work if what you drop support for breaks Facebook. Newgrounds never had the clout of Facebook, but dropping Flash gutted them. In a world where Newgrounds had become Facebook, Apple would have invested in Flash instead of killing it.
- cercatrova 7y agoCynically, the users who need such websites shouldn't use that browser. Fewer users, but potentially more technologically literate ones. Sounds like a win-win to me.
- shadowgovt 7y agoIIUC, the goal has generally been to make browsers standards-compliant, not balkanize the space into multiple incompatible browsers.
- ForHackernews 7y agoI don't think the internet is well served by a monoculture of user agents all speaking HTTPS (and only HTTPS) and trying to cram everything under the sun into HTML/CSS/JS. My personal preference would be for more specialized agents speaking protocols designed for their use case: email over SMTP/IMAP (or JMAP!), newsreaders with RSS, chat on XMPP, etc, content browsers with some limited markup language, maybe games and fat apps loaded as binaries to a sandbox VM. Maybe this is unrealistic and that time is passed, but the internet used to work more like what I've described. Today, more and more things are just a JS webapp that only runs properly in Chrome.