8 ms·

When 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 sinc

by madrox 6y ago

When 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. Local operating systems, which this essay says is the gold standard of feature sets, are not standing still. If you think of how long it will take for browsers to reach current parity, go back that amount of time and see how far the OS has come. But let's consider, for a moment, that browsers catch up. Let's just look at native development in general, since this has had access to all local OS features since before the web. Has that never changed? It's changing all the time. We're finding higher abstractions to work with. We're making it easier. I highly doubt Grid and Flexbox as they exist today will still be how web layout works in 20 years. Google isn't even the first to scare the world. This essay could've been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. Stop laughing. It held even more dominance than Chrome does today, and was closed source. Somehow we survived...which is good, because VRML sucked. However, even with all that aside, people have been rolling their own browsers for years. People fork chromium today. The dark web exists. Maybe in 20 years lots of people will be streaming everything from a private cloud supercomputer vis-a-vis Stadia. The internet is no more homogeneous than all the people of the world. Everyone is finding new ways to access it all the time. This is why open standards are more important than browsers. It means anyone can build their own at any time based on the documentation and it can all read the same documents. So I wouldn't worry about this coming to pass in quite the way you think. Though running your browser in a VM isn't the worst idea.

cft 6y ago
In 20 years it will be impossible to manually browse to an unapproved "unsafe" URL in a general purpose browser.
- ktpsns 6y ago
  Well, its hardly possible to manually browse an unapproved unsafe URL even today. Ever tried to browse a site with a self-signed certificate? In most browsers you have to do a lot of extra clicks to get in. But there will always be special purpose browsers. There is "TOR browser" today, and we will have "vintage web browsers" the same way we have CLI/TLI browsers still today (thinking of elinks and lynx), or the same way as there are still FTP clients and Gopher clients.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    iPhone doesn't allow true 3rd party browsers only reskinned Safari. Apple even removed a browser for extending safari too much [0]. So while there will be vintage web browsers, normal people may not have access to them. https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/20/21524665/stadium-stadia-browser-app-store-ios-apple-workaround-game-streaming https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/20/21524665/stadium-stadia-...
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    All the certificate verifies is that the server you are connected to actually belongs to someone who controls the domain that it's hosted at. You can get one issued for free just by demonstrating that you actually control the domain.
    - ktpsns 6y ago
      There is so much on TLS beyond Let's Encrypt. For instance, TLS allows user certificates to authenticate the user, not the server. This works a bit like SSH passwordless login (thanks to key authentication). This technique only works if the site operator also controls a CA which the browser accepts. Companies can easily install self-signed certs to do so, but on the wild web that's quite difficult. So yeah, even today there are use cases for custom CAs.
      - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
        I'm aware that client certificates exist. I'm not aware of anyone actually using them. It also doesn't really have the problem of "unapproved" sites. You are already installing a certificate on the client. It's no extra work to add another trusted CA at the same time.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  This is the real nightmare scenario...
ktpsns 6y ago
As some who has used the Web since 2000, I could not second more! Chrome dominance feels a bit better then Internet Explorer dominance, because the Microsoft browser was shitty about features and documentation (anybody remembers quirks mode and the IE box model?). In the grand, the overall topics did not change (in many cases it's always been about DRMs, OS support, being the first setting/implementing the standards/proposals). Unfortunately the web browser landscape got thinner. The decline of Opera and the modern Internet Explorer (what was his name again?) is a real loss for web diversity.
rmason 6y ago
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 and to some of us he was a true rockstar programmer.
- kgwgk 6y ago
  You're right. The explosion of the multi-plaform web happened in 1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libwww https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libwww
  - BryanBigs 6y ago
    I was using the web in college in 1993. After my very first experience with a browser, i thought gopher was superior. Of course, a 1200 baud connection makes graphics a bit less impressive and more of a pita.
    - kgwgk 6y ago
      Lucky you, that had access to a graphical browser! My first experience was sending an email with the url I wanted to access to a server that would send back the hypertext document a few minutes later. Edit: Something like https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1996-02-20-3077566-story.html https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1996-02-20-3077566-story.h...
- xorcist 6y ago
  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_before_1995 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.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> This essay could've been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. I've been reading a whitepaper from ~1997 on Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM) last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn't stop thinking: this is microservices. And it was really more than that - at least on the surface, this was microservices + orchestration + autoscaling + serverless, as well as, via Internet Explorer, component-based UIs with graceful degradation. That paper seems like a window to an alternate reality in which everything that's currently hot in tech has been done 20 years ago, except programming language-agnostic, using saner (i.e. binary) protocols, offline-first, and with advanced security built in from the start. I don't know why this is not our "real" reality, but I finally understand why MS was in a dominant position back then, and why IE was a hot thing. EDIT: for the curious, the mentioned whitepaper is: https://www.softwaretoolbox.com/dcom/DCOM%20Technical%20Overview.pdf https://www.softwaretoolbox.com/dcom/DCOM%20Technical%20Over....
- ddlutz 6y ago
  link to the paper?
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Provided in an edit.
- golergka 6y ago
  It often happens when the technology satisfies a need the market haven't really felt yet. Microservices are hot now because many companies and individual developers have already felt the pain on their own experience. Without such experience, advanced technology just seems "unnecessary complicated" compared to the simple LAMP-based monolith that "just gets the job done".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- SCHiM 6y ago
  This still exists! COM serves as the foundation of modern windows apps you currently see on Windows 10 (WinRT). And still actively developed in its form as WinRT. COM sadly has a number of unfortunate characteristics though: it's quite complex to learn and it's not very secure actually (de-serialization of complex types in C anyone?) But I think it's a wonderful technology.
grishka 6y ago
> go back that amount of time and see how far the OS has come. How much did it though? Strictly speaking, an OS is an abstraction on top of hardware that applications are written against. That's it. OSes of 2007 did a good job of abstracting the hardware away from applications. They also weren't as user-hostile as the modern ones, so one could argue that they were better. Operating systems had been feature-complete for quite a while. Those yearly updates serve no practical purpose.
- madrox 6y ago
  This same argument could be made about browsers depending on the value one places on specific advances. The original author is arguing there will be a point where there’s simply nothing new to add to the browser because it will do everything the OS does. There are any number of ways to argue just not how it works.
  - grishka 6y ago
    I personally don't think browsers need to be able to do stuff like exposing USB, Bluetooth and MIDI to websites. They aren't a substitute for a real OS as an app platform, and they should stop trying to become one. They're for reading (hyper)text, writing text (including filling forms), and watching videos. An aside: as someone who comes from Android app development and now makes a hobby project that includes a web interface, making the browser do what I want it to feels like I'm building a UI in a Word document, complete with macros. The ability to have this free-flowing text that isn't contained in anything, this whole concept of "inline elements" still hurts my head. I'm too used to real UI frameworks where any text is only allowed to exist inside a TextView.
Timpy 6y ago
That 2007 passage really brought me to a grinding hault. Toddlers are using the web these days from the moment they can swipe a screen. I have a hard time believing anybody on GitHub over the age of 20 only began using the internet in 2007.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  The technology to let toddlers use the web didn't really exist until rather recently. In 2003, we got broadband internet at our house. Before then, when we only had dial-up, only a single computer in the house could use the internet. Broadband internet brought with it external modems you could connect to via wifi rather than sitting inside your computer [1], and this meant you could use other devices than the primary family computer to browse the internet, even assuming you had more computers in your household than just the one. The iPhone came out in 2007, and is generally credited with ushering in the smartphone revolution. The iPad came out in 2010, making a somewhat larger form factor to enable the touchscreen interaction with the computer. From observation of my 3-year-old nephew, his ability to meaningfully use the computer via keyboard and mouse is quite limited. And I'm not sure he's all that capable with the touchscreen; he still hasn't understood that the reason he can't see me is that my phone doesn't have a camera and tries pushing stuff on the phone to make the camera turn on, inevitably resulting in him pushing the "end call" button. I can totally buy a 10-year-old in 2007 who had never used the internet, especially if they came from a poorer household that didn't have the ability to keep up with technology and lived in a school district that didn't have the ability to give all their kids laptops. [1] This does also show my age, as I never experienced the age of external modems connected via serial cables.
- fallat 6y ago
  I didn't regularly use the Internet until I was 13ish. I wanted to be fair in the timeframe so that's why I said that. I probably encountered the Internet many many times before then, but it was not for regular usage.
  - mdip 6y ago
    A little off topic, but thanks for sharing: The age of 13 seems to be a common thread with a lot of developers -- I know of 5 others who will point to that age as "when they started writing software". It was age 13 when I started assembling and selling PCs (in the 90s) and began exploring software development and before my 14th birthday that I had re-written a BBS application in PASCAL. Like you, I had been messing around with my (horrible) computer[0] since it arrived in our house and I was presented with an `A>` with no clue how to proceed, but it wasn't until I was 13 that my Dad presented me with a plan and a book to fix that problem[1]. I wanted a 386 so I could play Wing Commander (and see more than the 4 colors that my CGA display allowed -- loved the LSD trip that games like Kings Quest would put you through while trying to render decent graphics using practically nothing, but I was ready to be done with that). I remember thinking my dad was insane -- he owned a business selling things to large automotive manufacturers ... nothing event adjacent to computers. And a computer was easily the most complicated consumer electronics device a person could own. Having had to fix our 8088 a few times, and being generally the most "handy person" I've ever known, his response was a dismissive "they're all just a bunch of parts that you buy and put together". And while I'm pretty sure he helped me build/troubleshoot the first couple of them (we had some bad components early on from a vendor in California), I generally built/tested/assembled all of the few hundred that we sold, myself. If you want a 13-year-old to behave more like a "Grown Up", well, when your Dad's friends are paying you thousands of dollars to build them a computer, you start to act like someone who's worthy of receiving that kind of trust. The best part: we built the first several computers to pay for the one we wanted for ourselves[2]. My dad owned his company. I'm willing to wager that he could have afforded to just buy the thing for me and probably wouldn't have felt all that guilty about spoiling his kid since I was using it 99% of the time to do things other than play games. But this served as a forcing function -- I got the exact computer with the exact specifications that I wanted without having to think about the cost of those things provided I could sell enough computers to purchase it. I did. And I got to buy a convertible for my first car with money I had earned. I'm seeing it now, in my own kids, two of which turn 13 in the next few months. They're working with Roblox's developer tools making new worlds and I'm staring over their shoulder thinking: this application is easily as complicated to use as any of the design tools I've been exposed to and these kids are just ripping through it like it's "not work" (if only they were getting paid!). I've been looking for things to motivate them to step out of the "game world" and realize that the things they're doing could be done outside of Roblox -- they could make real applications, but much like I didn't believe my dad when he handed me that book, they haven't had that "ah ha" moment, yet. [0] My friends all had Commodore 64s and such that played really cool (if slowly loading) games and cost a few hundred dollars. We had a $3,000 IBM 8088 clone with a 10MB hard drive and floppy drive that ... wasn't fun. [1] I can't remember the title completely but it was something like "Build an 80486 PC and Save A Bundle" [2] My 80486, if memory serves, cost just shy of $10,000. We went with what would be called "server hardware" these days: SCSI over (very new) IDE or (very old) MFM -- we went SCSI with a full height 360MB drive (40MB drives were huge), a very nice video card and a 18" CRT display (14" was 'normal' with anything above starting at twice the price of the best 14" display). And two modems... I ran a multi-node BBS on custom software originally based on Telegard.

by madrox 6y ago

cft 6y ago

In 20 years it will be impossible to manually browse to an unapproved "unsafe" URL in a general purpose browser.

ktpsns 6y ago
Well, its hardly possible to manually browse an unapproved unsafe URL even today. Ever tried to browse a site with a self-signed certificate? In most browsers you have to do a lot of extra clicks to get in. But there will always be special purpose browsers. There is "TOR browser" today, and we will have "vintage web browsers" the same way we have CLI/TLI browsers still today (thinking of elinks and lynx), or the same way as there are still FTP clients and Gopher clients.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  iPhone doesn't allow true 3rd party browsers only reskinned Safari. Apple even removed a browser for extending safari too much [0]. So while there will be vintage web browsers, normal people may not have access to them. https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/20/21524665/stadium-stadia-browser-app-store-ios-apple-workaround-game-streaming https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/20/21524665/stadium-stadia-...
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  All the certificate verifies is that the server you are connected to actually belongs to someone who controls the domain that it's hosted at. You can get one issued for free just by demonstrating that you actually control the domain.
  - ktpsns 6y ago
    There is so much on TLS beyond Let's Encrypt. For instance, TLS allows user certificates to authenticate the user, not the server. This works a bit like SSH passwordless login (thanks to key authentication). This technique only works if the site operator also controls a CA which the browser accepts. Companies can easily install self-signed certs to do so, but on the wild web that's quite difficult. So yeah, even today there are use cases for custom CAs.
    - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
      I'm aware that client certificates exist. I'm not aware of anyone actually using them. It also doesn't really have the problem of "unapproved" sites. You are already installing a certificate on the client. It's no extra work to add another trusted CA at the same time.
cbozeman 6y ago
This is the real nightmare scenario...

ktpsns 6y ago

As some who has used the Web since 2000, I could not second more! Chrome dominance feels a bit better then Internet Explorer dominance, because the Microsoft browser was shitty about features and documentation (anybody remembers quirks mode and the IE box model?). In the grand, the overall topics did not change (in many cases it's always been about DRMs, OS support, being the first setting/implementing the standards/proposals). Unfortunately the web browser landscape got thinner. The decline of Opera and the modern Internet Explorer (what was his name again?) is a real loss for web diversity.

rmason 6y ago

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 and to some of us he was a true rockstar programmer.

kgwgk 6y ago
You're right. The explosion of the multi-plaform web happened in 1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libwww https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libwww
- BryanBigs 6y ago
  I was using the web in college in 1993. After my very first experience with a browser, i thought gopher was superior. Of course, a 1200 baud connection makes graphics a bit less impressive and more of a pita.
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    Lucky you, that had access to a graphical browser! My first experience was sending an email with the url I wanted to access to a server that would send back the hypertext document a few minutes later. Edit: Something like https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1996-02-20-3077566-story.html https://www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1996-02-20-3077566-story.h...
xorcist 6y ago
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_before_1995 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.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> This essay could've been written in 2002...about Internet Explorer. I've been reading a whitepaper from ~1997 on Microsoft's Distributed COM (DCOM) last night, and as I was reading it, I couldn't stop thinking: this is microservices. And it was really more than that - at least on the surface, this was microservices + orchestration + autoscaling + serverless, as well as, via Internet Explorer, component-based UIs with graceful degradation. That paper seems like a window to an alternate reality in which everything that's currently hot in tech has been done 20 years ago, except programming language-agnostic, using saner (i.e. binary) protocols, offline-first, and with advanced security built in from the start. I don't know why this is not our "real" reality, but I finally understand why MS was in a dominant position back then, and why IE was a hot thing. EDIT: for the curious, the mentioned whitepaper is: https://www.softwaretoolbox.com/dcom/DCOM%20Technical%20Overview.pdf https://www.softwaretoolbox.com/dcom/DCOM%20Technical%20Over....

ddlutz 6y ago
link to the paper?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Provided in an edit.
golergka 6y ago
It often happens when the technology satisfies a need the market haven't really felt yet. Microservices are hot now because many companies and individual developers have already felt the pain on their own experience. Without such experience, advanced technology just seems "unnecessary complicated" compared to the simple LAMP-based monolith that "just gets the job done".
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SCHiM 6y ago
This still exists! COM serves as the foundation of modern windows apps you currently see on Windows 10 (WinRT). And still actively developed in its form as WinRT. COM sadly has a number of unfortunate characteristics though: it's quite complex to learn and it's not very secure actually (de-serialization of complex types in C anyone?) But I think it's a wonderful technology.

grishka 6y ago

> go back that amount of time and see how far the OS has come. How much did it though? Strictly speaking, an OS is an abstraction on top of hardware that applications are written against. That's it. OSes of 2007 did a good job of abstracting the hardware away from applications. They also weren't as user-hostile as the modern ones, so one could argue that they were better. Operating systems had been feature-complete for quite a while. Those yearly updates serve no practical purpose.

madrox 6y ago
This same argument could be made about browsers depending on the value one places on specific advances. The original author is arguing there will be a point where there’s simply nothing new to add to the browser because it will do everything the OS does. There are any number of ways to argue just not how it works.
- grishka 6y ago
  I personally don't think browsers need to be able to do stuff like exposing USB, Bluetooth and MIDI to websites. They aren't a substitute for a real OS as an app platform, and they should stop trying to become one. They're for reading (hyper)text, writing text (including filling forms), and watching videos. An aside: as someone who comes from Android app development and now makes a hobby project that includes a web interface, making the browser do what I want it to feels like I'm building a UI in a Word document, complete with macros. The ability to have this free-flowing text that isn't contained in anything, this whole concept of "inline elements" still hurts my head. I'm too used to real UI frameworks where any text is only allowed to exist inside a TextView.

Timpy 6y ago

That 2007 passage really brought me to a grinding hault. Toddlers are using the web these days from the moment they can swipe a screen. I have a hard time believing anybody on GitHub over the age of 20 only began using the internet in 2007.

jcranmer 6y ago
The technology to let toddlers use the web didn't really exist until rather recently. In 2003, we got broadband internet at our house. Before then, when we only had dial-up, only a single computer in the house could use the internet. Broadband internet brought with it external modems you could connect to via wifi rather than sitting inside your computer [1], and this meant you could use other devices than the primary family computer to browse the internet, even assuming you had more computers in your household than just the one. The iPhone came out in 2007, and is generally credited with ushering in the smartphone revolution. The iPad came out in 2010, making a somewhat larger form factor to enable the touchscreen interaction with the computer. From observation of my 3-year-old nephew, his ability to meaningfully use the computer via keyboard and mouse is quite limited. And I'm not sure he's all that capable with the touchscreen; he still hasn't understood that the reason he can't see me is that my phone doesn't have a camera and tries pushing stuff on the phone to make the camera turn on, inevitably resulting in him pushing the "end call" button. I can totally buy a 10-year-old in 2007 who had never used the internet, especially if they came from a poorer household that didn't have the ability to keep up with technology and lived in a school district that didn't have the ability to give all their kids laptops. [1] This does also show my age, as I never experienced the age of external modems connected via serial cables.
fallat 6y ago
I didn't regularly use the Internet until I was 13ish. I wanted to be fair in the timeframe so that's why I said that. I probably encountered the Internet many many times before then, but it was not for regular usage.
- mdip 6y ago
  A little off topic, but thanks for sharing: The age of 13 seems to be a common thread with a lot of developers -- I know of 5 others who will point to that age as "when they started writing software". It was age 13 when I started assembling and selling PCs (in the 90s) and began exploring software development and before my 14th birthday that I had re-written a BBS application in PASCAL. Like you, I had been messing around with my (horrible) computer[0] since it arrived in our house and I was presented with an `A>` with no clue how to proceed, but it wasn't until I was 13 that my Dad presented me with a plan and a book to fix that problem[1]. I wanted a 386 so I could play Wing Commander (and see more than the 4 colors that my CGA display allowed -- loved the LSD trip that games like Kings Quest would put you through while trying to render decent graphics using practically nothing, but I was ready to be done with that). I remember thinking my dad was insane -- he owned a business selling things to large automotive manufacturers ... nothing event adjacent to computers. And a computer was easily the most complicated consumer electronics device a person could own. Having had to fix our 8088 a few times, and being generally the most "handy person" I've ever known, his response was a dismissive "they're all just a bunch of parts that you buy and put together". And while I'm pretty sure he helped me build/troubleshoot the first couple of them (we had some bad components early on from a vendor in California), I generally built/tested/assembled all of the few hundred that we sold, myself. If you want a 13-year-old to behave more like a "Grown Up", well, when your Dad's friends are paying you thousands of dollars to build them a computer, you start to act like someone who's worthy of receiving that kind of trust. The best part: we built the first several computers to pay for the one we wanted for ourselves[2]. My dad owned his company. I'm willing to wager that he could have afforded to just buy the thing for me and probably wouldn't have felt all that guilty about spoiling his kid since I was using it 99% of the time to do things other than play games. But this served as a forcing function -- I got the exact computer with the exact specifications that I wanted without having to think about the cost of those things provided I could sell enough computers to purchase it. I did. And I got to buy a convertible for my first car with money I had earned. I'm seeing it now, in my own kids, two of which turn 13 in the next few months. They're working with Roblox's developer tools making new worlds and I'm staring over their shoulder thinking: this application is easily as complicated to use as any of the design tools I've been exposed to and these kids are just ripping through it like it's "not work" (if only they were getting paid!). I've been looking for things to motivate them to step out of the "game world" and realize that the things they're doing could be done outside of Roblox -- they could make real applications, but much like I didn't believe my dad when he handed me that book, they haven't had that "ah ha" moment, yet. [0] My friends all had Commodore 64s and such that played really cool (if slowly loading) games and cost a few hundred dollars. We had a $3,000 IBM 8088 clone with a 10MB hard drive and floppy drive that ... wasn't fun. [1] I can't remember the title completely but it was something like "Build an 80486 PC and Save A Bundle" [2] My 80486, if memory serves, cost just shy of $10,000. We went with what would be called "server hardware" these days: SCSI over (very new) IDE or (very old) MFM -- we went SCSI with a full height 360MB drive (40MB drives were huge), a very nice video card and a 18" CRT display (14" was 'normal' with anything above starting at twice the price of the best 14" display). And two modems... I ran a multi-node BBS on custom software originally based on Telegard.