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In almost everything, advancement comes from competition, and competition comes from diversity. Without diversity, things will become stale. Between the fall o

In almost everything, advancement comes from competition, and competition comes from diversity. Without diversity, things will become stale. Between the fall of Netscape and rise of Firefox; Internet Explorer reigned the Browsers, and to be honest web and web development was a boring field. Once Firefox was released, web and web development revived. It popularized things like web 2.0, table-less css layouts, using web browser as an application development platform, etc. Monopoly is never good, even if that monopoly is the best and perfect. There's innovation and strength in diversity. I always encourage people to never settle into one tool and always looks for alternatives out there.

userbinator 6y ago
Internet Explorer reigned the Browsers, and to be honest web and web development was a boring field. Once Firefox was released, web and web development revived. Boring is good. It means a stable platform you can rely on. It popularized things like web 2.0, table-less css layouts, using web browser as an application development platform, etc. ...and now we have sites that would be perfectly fine as static HTML being turned into app-sites that require running megabytes of arbitrary code just to render some static content, consuming resources on every single machine that visits them, every time they visit.
- wintorez 6y ago
  Fair points, but web today is not what web was intended for. It was supposed to be a document delivery network, but it became an application development platform. Why? Because we need a sandboxed, distributed application delivery platform, and every previous solution failed or didn't catch on: Java Applets, ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, etc. The business case of developing client-side applications trumps the need for a faster web at the moment. Is it ideal? No. Can it be fixed? Yes. How? Come up with a new rich application delivery solution that works in every modern browser in every modern os (mobile/desktop). EDIT: I partially blame Adobe's hubris for the current situation. They should have made Flash player technology free & open-source and focused on monetizing Flash creation suites. Instead they kept it closed, and that led to Apple dropping it in iOS. After that, for all intents and purposes, Flash was done.

userbinator 6y ago

Internet Explorer reigned the Browsers, and to be honest web and web development was a boring field. Once Firefox was released, web and web development revived. Boring is good. It means a stable platform you can rely on. It popularized things like web 2.0, table-less css layouts, using web browser as an application development platform, etc. ...and now we have sites that would be perfectly fine as static HTML being turned into app-sites that require running megabytes of arbitrary code just to render some static content, consuming resources on every single machine that visits them, every time they visit.

wintorez 6y ago
Fair points, but web today is not what web was intended for. It was supposed to be a document delivery network, but it became an application development platform. Why? Because we need a sandboxed, distributed application delivery platform, and every previous solution failed or didn't catch on: Java Applets, ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, etc. The business case of developing client-side applications trumps the need for a faster web at the moment. Is it ideal? No. Can it be fixed? Yes. How? Come up with a new rich application delivery solution that works in every modern browser in every modern os (mobile/desktop). EDIT: I partially blame Adobe's hubris for the current situation. They should have made Flash player technology free & open-source and focused on monetizing Flash creation suites. Instead they kept it closed, and that led to Apple dropping it in iOS. After that, for all intents and purposes, Flash was done.