5 ms·

You might consider advising your friend to shy away from the "rant" and "hot take" styles, I know it's popular among bloggers and twitter users but it's pretty

by zxzax 5y ago

You might consider advising your friend to shy away from the "rant" and "hot take" styles, I know it's popular among bloggers and twitter users but it's pretty uninteresting reading for someone who's read this type of post about web browsers for what feels like the 1000th time... If it was feasible from a technical and business standpoint for the chromium team to cut costs and remove 95% of the features added in the last 5-10 years, they would have done it by now!

dijit 5y ago
I will not be advising him of that because I share his opinion that the web is fast becoming/has become an application delivery system and not a document reading system with some media additions; in fact many here reading this will say "duh!" because they assume this is a good thing. I don't think it's a good thing, I think it's inefficient and used against people as much as it's used _for_ people. Standards such as "WebUSB" are just incredulous. The fact that some very smart people managed to get a javascript renderer to go real fast seems to have spawned millions of people just to dump garbage into it constantly, and -require it to be enabled- to do things that used to be possible without it.. it's shockingly bad for accessibility, bad for performance, bad for my ram. But I guess you don't have to worry about _my_ ram. I'm very sure it's profitable to turn the web into an application platform, and it _is_ delivering a lot of actual value to a lot of people, certain things would never be possible, but it's abused too, and honestly it takes a lot away, privacy among them... but we can't talk about that as an industry because half of the people in it depend on that ecosystem being maintained. I'm not going to go as far as to say that "the web" is the new oil industry; because we have no oil spill equivalent and we havent gone to war about it (though the e-waste due to inefficiencies and "everyone has 8G of ram, right!?" is likely not helping the ecological situation). But the industry is propped up because it's too big to fail now, and you're damned if you get in the way.
- zeusk 5y ago
  Basically Google woke up and decided it wanted to be Microsoft without actually dealing with hardware vendors so let’s just put everything on web and hey, let’s track and show you ads while we do it at .98 efficiency
- folkhack 5y ago
  > I will not be advising him of that because I share his opinion that the web is fast becoming an application delivery system and not a document reading system with some media additions; in fact many here reading this will say "duh!" because they assume this is a good thing. I guess I'm one of those "duh" people. I think it already is an application platform/delivery system (has been for a long time), and I think that the ever-evolving web is a good thing. In college, I had professors literally laugh at me when I said I believed most software was moving toward the internet. Fast-forward to today and I'd say that their actual insults against my chosen direction of software engineering (targeting standards-based web solutions) were not only unprofessional - they were entirely not correct. Reading this document literally felt like I was hearing their arguments as to "what the internet should be" all over again... And, as someone who embraces the internet, I feel so much of this is regressive. Especially in regards to taking shots at stuff like WebRTC... Your friend and I differ so much in-that they argue against things like communication, graphics, gaming, etc in the browser where-as I have built a career off of embracing it. > I'm very sure it's profitable to turn the web into an application platform The web has been an application platform since ECMA landed in Netscape, and arguably long before that too. The anti-application "content presentation only" take has been something for a long time, and it is not going to happen or we'd still be on the original "Hyper Text Markup Language" spec. The web has always wanted to be more than it's previous spec... it's an ever-evolving standard that is designed to meet the changing needs of it's users in an ever-changing world. Information, capability, and expression all want to be free.
  - zeusk 5y ago
    If by free you mean mandatory accounts, activity trackers, 50% screen ads, background crypto miners, 8gb ram for reading the news and email, abysmal performance for what is essentially displaying text, media and information, literally WASM VMs and background webagents running in browser. No thanks, I'd like native back. I worked with a startup that is putting IDE into the web, and I kinda did like web at first. Then I worked at a startup that wanted to run jobs in client browser using WASM instead of cloud compute resources. At first, I really liked being able to run interpreted code, to change code at runtime without having to recompile, to be able to visit a website and then borrow code for theme/animations I liked. But that is long past now in the vDOM age for performance in what is a very inefficient system.
- zxzax 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what your opinion actually is? What you've stated is a fact, not an opinion: that's what the web platform is now. So it really makes no sense to rant about that, in context. You say you won't be advising him of that, but you also seem to be arguing in favor of advising him of that, not against, and are in fact already somewhat doing it already, so it's not clear what you meant there. It may benefit to be more consistent here, and make the advice to him anyway. What would make more sense, and be more valuable, would be to talk about what value was actually taken away, and what steps could be done to provide that value again, without taking other bits of value away in the process. The blog post, as it's written, only argues for taking more value away. So I didn't find it convincing towards that end, and it seems you didn't either, as per your GP comment. So I'm pretty confused by this follow up response.
  - zapzupnz 5y ago
    When you spend more time arguing about how the message was said rather than what the message is actually trying to convey, it doesn’t matter what the response is: it’s unlikely that you were ever going to listen to the message anyway. This isn’t directly specifically at you, just this whole thread in general.

by zxzax 5y ago

dijit 5y ago

I will not be advising him of that because I share his opinion that the web is fast becoming/has become an application delivery system and not a document reading system with some media additions; in fact many here reading this will say "duh!" because they assume this is a good thing. I don't think it's a good thing, I think it's inefficient and used against people as much as it's used _for_ people. Standards such as "WebUSB" are just incredulous. The fact that some very smart people managed to get a javascript renderer to go real fast seems to have spawned millions of people just to dump garbage into it constantly, and -require it to be enabled- to do things that used to be possible without it.. it's shockingly bad for accessibility, bad for performance, bad for my ram. But I guess you don't have to worry about _my_ ram. I'm very sure it's profitable to turn the web into an application platform, and it _is_ delivering a lot of actual value to a lot of people, certain things would never be possible, but it's abused too, and honestly it takes a lot away, privacy among them... but we can't talk about that as an industry because half of the people in it depend on that ecosystem being maintained. I'm not going to go as far as to say that "the web" is the new oil industry; because we have no oil spill equivalent and we havent gone to war about it (though the e-waste due to inefficiencies and "everyone has 8G of ram, right!?" is likely not helping the ecological situation). But the industry is propped up because it's too big to fail now, and you're damned if you get in the way.

zeusk 5y ago
Basically Google woke up and decided it wanted to be Microsoft without actually dealing with hardware vendors so let’s just put everything on web and hey, let’s track and show you ads while we do it at .98 efficiency
folkhack 5y ago
> I will not be advising him of that because I share his opinion that the web is fast becoming an application delivery system and not a document reading system with some media additions; in fact many here reading this will say "duh!" because they assume this is a good thing. I guess I'm one of those "duh" people. I think it already is an application platform/delivery system (has been for a long time), and I think that the ever-evolving web is a good thing. In college, I had professors literally laugh at me when I said I believed most software was moving toward the internet. Fast-forward to today and I'd say that their actual insults against my chosen direction of software engineering (targeting standards-based web solutions) were not only unprofessional - they were entirely not correct. Reading this document literally felt like I was hearing their arguments as to "what the internet should be" all over again... And, as someone who embraces the internet, I feel so much of this is regressive. Especially in regards to taking shots at stuff like WebRTC... Your friend and I differ so much in-that they argue against things like communication, graphics, gaming, etc in the browser where-as I have built a career off of embracing it. > I'm very sure it's profitable to turn the web into an application platform The web has been an application platform since ECMA landed in Netscape, and arguably long before that too. The anti-application "content presentation only" take has been something for a long time, and it is not going to happen or we'd still be on the original "Hyper Text Markup Language" spec. The web has always wanted to be more than it's previous spec... it's an ever-evolving standard that is designed to meet the changing needs of it's users in an ever-changing world. Information, capability, and expression all want to be free.
- zeusk 5y ago
  If by free you mean mandatory accounts, activity trackers, 50% screen ads, background crypto miners, 8gb ram for reading the news and email, abysmal performance for what is essentially displaying text, media and information, literally WASM VMs and background webagents running in browser. No thanks, I'd like native back. I worked with a startup that is putting IDE into the web, and I kinda did like web at first. Then I worked at a startup that wanted to run jobs in client browser using WASM instead of cloud compute resources. At first, I really liked being able to run interpreted code, to change code at runtime without having to recompile, to be able to visit a website and then borrow code for theme/animations I liked. But that is long past now in the vDOM age for performance in what is a very inefficient system.
zxzax 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand what your opinion actually is? What you've stated is a fact, not an opinion: that's what the web platform is now. So it really makes no sense to rant about that, in context. You say you won't be advising him of that, but you also seem to be arguing in favor of advising him of that, not against, and are in fact already somewhat doing it already, so it's not clear what you meant there. It may benefit to be more consistent here, and make the advice to him anyway. What would make more sense, and be more valuable, would be to talk about what value was actually taken away, and what steps could be done to provide that value again, without taking other bits of value away in the process. The blog post, as it's written, only argues for taking more value away. So I didn't find it convincing towards that end, and it seems you didn't either, as per your GP comment. So I'm pretty confused by this follow up response.
- zapzupnz 5y ago
  When you spend more time arguing about how the message was said rather than what the message is actually trying to convey, it doesn’t matter what the response is: it’s unlikely that you were ever going to listen to the message anyway. This isn’t directly specifically at you, just this whole thread in general.