6 ms·

I think Safari is going to have the market cornered on technology pessimism (aka privacy features) and browser performance per watt on macOS and iOS. Google is

I think Safari is going to have the market cornered on technology pessimism (aka privacy features) and browser performance per watt on macOS and iOS. Google is rapidly locking down enterprise by building in tight integrations with Google Workspace/G-Suite (see: context aware authentication). In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. The first step in their recovery is to convey what their vision of the web looks like in 2035 and commit to Firefox being the first browser to make it a reality by 2025.

bee_rider 6y ago
There's a world in which Apple views Mozilla as a potential ally in the whole "privacy" fight, but unfortunately I suspect it isn't the real one.
minikites 6y ago
>In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. Is the web better now than it was in 2005-2010? I don't think it is and I don't see the trend arbitrarily reversing. Tons of regular people (and even tech-savvy folks who should know better) voluntarily use, love, and advocate for using a browser (and email service!) made by the modern equivalent of DoubleClick.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  modern equivalent of DoubleClick Nitpick: they are DoubleClick: > DoubleClick was a company acquired by Google in 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick
- terracatta 6y ago
  Are there things that have gotten worse? Yes Are things way more complicated? Yes But net overall? I believe it's better than 2005 and even 2010. Meaning, I would not want to revert back to 2010 and start building back up from there. There is too much good we would lose in the process. I have no idea if my opinion is shared by the majority, but I am very optimistic about the future of the web.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I would not characterize people's choice of web browsers, or people's choice of which websites they want to interact with as "the web". The characteristics of the web from 20+ years ago are still there. Many or most people just prefer not to use that type of web from 20+ years ago. Everyone is still free to use whichever browser they want to access whichever website they want (in the US at least) in the same manner they did in the previous decades.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Were you actually alive in 2005-2010 or are you just guessing? Flash-based unskippable intros on fixed 640x480 centered viewports are the reality of the 2005 web, regardless of whatever nostalgia you suffer from.
  - hollerith 6y ago
    Flash was easy to avoid unless you needed certain sites for work or for school; I kept it disabled by deleting some files starting about 2006 or 2007. HTML5 on the other hand is impossible to avoid unless you want to restrict yourself to a few familiar sites. And web fonts are getting harder to avoid because more and more sites are using them to draw icons and other small UI elements. For people whose tastes are sufficiently like my own, the web has been getting worse. I used lynx as my daily driver for most of the 1990s and through 2005. In contrast, these days it is impractical for the average person to use a browser that is not maintained by an organization employing many hundreds of full-time developers. This dependency on money (to pay the developers) limits a person's options. I never wanted to be able to replace my desktop apps with apps that run on the web, so I don't consider web apps to be compensation for the constant stream of annoyances (e.g., the moral equivalent of pop-up windows asking me to give the site my email address) that HTML5, web fonts, et cetera, enabled.
  - minikites 6y ago
    We've replaced "waiting for unskippable Flash intros" with: - a web that is thoroughly unusable without an ad-blocker (ad-blocking was pretty optional in 2005) - waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G - waiting for Google web fonts to load because apparently shipping more than 4 fonts in common is beyond the ability of plucky upstarts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google - web "apps" with worse performance characteristics than programs that ran on 66 MHz machines
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      > - waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G I don't use Slack.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
laumars 6y ago
Firefox is a great deal more privacy focused than Safari when you start factoring in containers. I also wouldn’t trust Apple to stick to their privacy mission long term. It’s a marketing strategy that they seemingly care about at the moment but it’s supplementary to their core demographics so who’s to say they stick with this vision long term? I’m less concerned about the same happening with Firefox. > In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. That doesn’t align with the trends we’ve seen: - tracking getting ever more sophisticated (like using WebRTC to probe open ports) - large scale data mining sites like Facebook ignoring government regulations and getting away with it - bloat getting worse. So many sites don’t even render without JS enabled. The fact that people have to run things like PiHole and browser plugins to filter out some of that crap is telling. And how long is that going to last? Some sites are now proxying that crap behind their own domain and DoH will prevent users from running PiHole - The web slowly converting on a single rendering engine: Blink. It’s starting to feel a bit like the IE 5 days with everyone targeting the same browser. Just last week I couldn’t log into a pretty low tech website because their UA filtering said I was on an unsupported browser and greyed out the login button (I was on Firefox).
- hakfoo 6y ago
  Apple can try to swing around the privacy bat right now because they have alternate revenue streams. It will be interesting how long their shareholders will buy the premise that "we can earn more by using privacy to convince people to buy our high-margin kit and run Safari than we would by casting off the privacy mantle and getting deep into the data-grab business." The other side of the coin is that I really believe there's a bubble waiting to burst in that exact industry. The price of building and feeding hyper-targeted, data-bloated marketing machines is far out of scale with their utility for most use cases, but people are throwing silly money at it right now. (Compare the Smart TV/IoT device model, where they believe that peddling usage data is enough to justify an increased BoM AND frequently selling the product near or under cost). If they expect the bubble to burst (either through marketers coming to their senses or heavy-duty GDPR style regulation), they might be just "passively" pushing the privacy angle-- don't bother building out an infrastructure that will be worthless as soon as the bubble bursts, and you come out of it with a huge branding/goodwill win when everyone else reinvents their business model and invents privacy. I was surprised Chromium!Edge ended up being such a mess with privacy because, somewhat like Apple, MS has associated businesses that let them subsidize its development without having to leverage user data. They could have come out looking good-- weren't they the only ones who tried to make a go of Do Not Track headers?

bee_rider 6y ago

There's a world in which Apple views Mozilla as a potential ally in the whole "privacy" fight, but unfortunately I suspect it isn't the real one.

minikites 6y ago

>In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. Is the web better now than it was in 2005-2010? I don't think it is and I don't see the trend arbitrarily reversing. Tons of regular people (and even tech-savvy folks who should know better) voluntarily use, love, and advocate for using a browser (and email service!) made by the modern equivalent of DoubleClick.

nitrogen 6y ago
modern equivalent of DoubleClick Nitpick: they are DoubleClick: > DoubleClick was a company acquired by Google in 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick
terracatta 6y ago
Are there things that have gotten worse? Yes Are things way more complicated? Yes But net overall? I believe it's better than 2005 and even 2010. Meaning, I would not want to revert back to 2010 and start building back up from there. There is too much good we would lose in the process. I have no idea if my opinion is shared by the majority, but I am very optimistic about the future of the web.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
I would not characterize people's choice of web browsers, or people's choice of which websites they want to interact with as "the web". The characteristics of the web from 20+ years ago are still there. Many or most people just prefer not to use that type of web from 20+ years ago. Everyone is still free to use whichever browser they want to access whichever website they want (in the US at least) in the same manner they did in the previous decades.
jeffbee 6y ago
Were you actually alive in 2005-2010 or are you just guessing? Flash-based unskippable intros on fixed 640x480 centered viewports are the reality of the 2005 web, regardless of whatever nostalgia you suffer from.
- hollerith 6y ago
  Flash was easy to avoid unless you needed certain sites for work or for school; I kept it disabled by deleting some files starting about 2006 or 2007. HTML5 on the other hand is impossible to avoid unless you want to restrict yourself to a few familiar sites. And web fonts are getting harder to avoid because more and more sites are using them to draw icons and other small UI elements. For people whose tastes are sufficiently like my own, the web has been getting worse. I used lynx as my daily driver for most of the 1990s and through 2005. In contrast, these days it is impractical for the average person to use a browser that is not maintained by an organization employing many hundreds of full-time developers. This dependency on money (to pay the developers) limits a person's options. I never wanted to be able to replace my desktop apps with apps that run on the web, so I don't consider web apps to be compensation for the constant stream of annoyances (e.g., the moral equivalent of pop-up windows asking me to give the site my email address) that HTML5, web fonts, et cetera, enabled.
- minikites 6y ago
  We've replaced "waiting for unskippable Flash intros" with: - a web that is thoroughly unusable without an ad-blocker (ad-blocking was pretty optional in 2005) - waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G - waiting for Google web fonts to load because apparently shipping more than 4 fonts in common is beyond the ability of plucky upstarts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google - web "apps" with worse performance characteristics than programs that ran on 66 MHz machines
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    > - waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G I don't use Slack.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

laumars 6y ago

Firefox is a great deal more privacy focused than Safari when you start factoring in containers. I also wouldn’t trust Apple to stick to their privacy mission long term. It’s a marketing strategy that they seemingly care about at the moment but it’s supplementary to their core demographics so who’s to say they stick with this vision long term? I’m less concerned about the same happening with Firefox. > In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. That doesn’t align with the trends we’ve seen: - tracking getting ever more sophisticated (like using WebRTC to probe open ports) - large scale data mining sites like Facebook ignoring government regulations and getting away with it - bloat getting worse. So many sites don’t even render without JS enabled. The fact that people have to run things like PiHole and browser plugins to filter out some of that crap is telling. And how long is that going to last? Some sites are now proxying that crap behind their own domain and DoH will prevent users from running PiHole - The web slowly converting on a single rendering engine: Blink. It’s starting to feel a bit like the IE 5 days with everyone targeting the same browser. Just last week I couldn’t log into a pretty low tech website because their UA filtering said I was on an unsupported browser and greyed out the login button (I was on Firefox).

hakfoo 6y ago
Apple can try to swing around the privacy bat right now because they have alternate revenue streams. It will be interesting how long their shareholders will buy the premise that "we can earn more by using privacy to convince people to buy our high-margin kit and run Safari than we would by casting off the privacy mantle and getting deep into the data-grab business." The other side of the coin is that I really believe there's a bubble waiting to burst in that exact industry. The price of building and feeding hyper-targeted, data-bloated marketing machines is far out of scale with their utility for most use cases, but people are throwing silly money at it right now. (Compare the Smart TV/IoT device model, where they believe that peddling usage data is enough to justify an increased BoM AND frequently selling the product near or under cost). If they expect the bubble to burst (either through marketers coming to their senses or heavy-duty GDPR style regulation), they might be just "passively" pushing the privacy angle-- don't bother building out an infrastructure that will be worthless as soon as the bubble bursts, and you come out of it with a huge branding/goodwill win when everyone else reinvents their business model and invents privacy. I was surprised Chromium!Edge ended up being such a mess with privacy because, somewhat like Apple, MS has associated businesses that let them subsidize its development without having to leverage user data. They could have come out looking good-- weren't they the only ones who tried to make a go of Do Not Track headers?