5 ms·

I'm strongly sympathetic to the Alan Kay vision of browsers-as-operating systems (see an earlier comment on a similar topic [0]) and yet I still miss the days w

by oddity 6y ago

I'm strongly sympathetic to the Alan Kay vision of browsers-as-operating systems (see an earlier comment on a similar topic [0]) and yet I still miss the days where I could read what someone had to say without loading yet another JS webapp. The dumb document viewer model for the web was probably doomed from the start. There are just too many unique ways to consume media, so instead, we as an industry repurposed the document layer (http) as a portable distribution platform for all the new web browsers that could just be dumb document viewers accessible to a mass audience of creators (facebook, twitter, youtube, etc...). I think the Electron/ChromeOS/FirefoxOS/WebOS/Early iOS model is us finally recognizing that we've made some levels redundant and are now collapsing the stack (browser/native OS). It's slow, it's ugly, but we're getting there. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855029

tpmx 6y ago
Let's imagine that sometime around 2007 or so, we had decided to make make web apps (full-blown-apps) separate from web pages (structured documents, perhaps with some light level of dynamic aspects). I think Google were smarter than all of us. They hired all these (often very young, smart but inexperienced) standards people they could find, and set them to work on making the browser the new OS.
- oddity 6y ago
  Merging the browser and OS has been attempted so often, I'd hesitate to say that Google was smarter than all of us. It's probably more that they had the most leverage and motive to be to be successful. To me, the interesting development was that we as an industry rushed to native (ObjC) on iOS so quickly once it was available only to later return to web technologies with Electron and friends, but there were reasonable technical arguments for that at the time so it's hard for me to say that anyone was an idiot. Web technologies in the 00s were... not good.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    The bigger picture is: Google hired lots of these web standards people.. who then just went nuts in creating so many web standards/apis/complexity. In retrospect I would guess they were probably meeting KPIs. So, to the plan to dominate the web was there already around 2007-2008 or or so, all while hiring lot and lots of very talented C++ developers (probably like 3k of them working on chrome by now, I haven't kept up the past five years). Together they built the monopoly/duopoly that is called Chrome. It's built on open standards, but enforced by an ever growing complexity.
    - oddity 6y ago
      For sure. My objection is that I think that move was more obvious for Google than it was for, say, Microsoft or Apple, who still had a native-mindset and wanted to lock people into their existing platforms. Arguably, Google's move was a response to the threat of native lock in. Once they started, it was easier to execute on than smaller web-centric companies because they had the unique privilege of advertizing the Google Browser on... Google. That web technologies actually became wildly popular for native-style apps probably owes more to the diversification of platforms and difficulty of writing native apps for all of them, otherwise it would have become yet another platform that no one writes apps for. I don't know if Google could or did predict that.
      - wombatmobile 6y ago
        The biggest, strongest, insurmountablest advantage Google had over MS, Apple, Sun, Nokia, Oracle, Adobe and everybody else is that they didn't need to sell anything, hardware or software. They just needed a platform for selling ads. Any platform would do, so long as it would catch on and no ad competitor controlled it.
- wmf 6y ago
  Let's imagine that ... we had decided to make make web apps (full-blown-apps) separate from web pages Java? Flash? NaCl? Somehow JS+HTML+CSS beat them all.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    I'm (or, well, was) thinking more like HTML+CSS for web pages and JS+HTML+CSS for web apps.

by oddity 6y ago

tpmx 6y ago

Let's imagine that sometime around 2007 or so, we had decided to make make web apps (full-blown-apps) separate from web pages (structured documents, perhaps with some light level of dynamic aspects). I think Google were smarter than all of us. They hired all these (often very young, smart but inexperienced) standards people they could find, and set them to work on making the browser the new OS.

oddity 6y ago
Merging the browser and OS has been attempted so often, I'd hesitate to say that Google was smarter than all of us. It's probably more that they had the most leverage and motive to be to be successful. To me, the interesting development was that we as an industry rushed to native (ObjC) on iOS so quickly once it was available only to later return to web technologies with Electron and friends, but there were reasonable technical arguments for that at the time so it's hard for me to say that anyone was an idiot. Web technologies in the 00s were... not good.
- tpmx 6y ago
  The bigger picture is: Google hired lots of these web standards people.. who then just went nuts in creating so many web standards/apis/complexity. In retrospect I would guess they were probably meeting KPIs. So, to the plan to dominate the web was there already around 2007-2008 or or so, all while hiring lot and lots of very talented C++ developers (probably like 3k of them working on chrome by now, I haven't kept up the past five years). Together they built the monopoly/duopoly that is called Chrome. It's built on open standards, but enforced by an ever growing complexity.
  - oddity 6y ago
    For sure. My objection is that I think that move was more obvious for Google than it was for, say, Microsoft or Apple, who still had a native-mindset and wanted to lock people into their existing platforms. Arguably, Google's move was a response to the threat of native lock in. Once they started, it was easier to execute on than smaller web-centric companies because they had the unique privilege of advertizing the Google Browser on... Google. That web technologies actually became wildly popular for native-style apps probably owes more to the diversification of platforms and difficulty of writing native apps for all of them, otherwise it would have become yet another platform that no one writes apps for. I don't know if Google could or did predict that.
    - wombatmobile 6y ago
      The biggest, strongest, insurmountablest advantage Google had over MS, Apple, Sun, Nokia, Oracle, Adobe and everybody else is that they didn't need to sell anything, hardware or software. They just needed a platform for selling ads. Any platform would do, so long as it would catch on and no ad competitor controlled it.
wmf 6y ago
Let's imagine that ... we had decided to make make web apps (full-blown-apps) separate from web pages Java? Flash? NaCl? Somehow JS+HTML+CSS beat them all.
- tpmx 6y ago
  I'm (or, well, was) thinking more like HTML+CSS for web pages and JS+HTML+CSS for web apps.