8 ms·

Unpopular opinion: We would've been better off keeping web plugins and isolating those in a "click to play"-container rather than turning the web browser into a

Unpopular opinion: We would've been better off keeping web plugins and isolating those in a "click to play"-container rather than turning the web browser into an operating system.

nobody0 5y ago
This idea is not unpopular in hn I guess.
ducktective 5y ago
I mean what is the use of a "Web Browser" anyway? Couldn't each OS app communicate with its server over TCP/IP? At what point people decided HTML/CSS/JS is the epitome of user interaction for dynamic applications such as document editing, mapping and routing, media playing, chatting...?
- gmueckl 5y ago
  I think goes as far back as the dot com bubble when managers started to realize that it's easy to earn money by doing X, but on a website.
- Santosh83 5y ago
  I think because the document centric web was already there, the infrastructure was there, and it was much more easier to extend it than to come up with a million NIH solutions. Each app can communicate over its own protocol but the web allows interoperability and that is its greatest strength IMO.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Navigating to a web page is so much easier than installing an application. Even with modern operating systems like iOS. Despite the fact that web pages are getting more and more bloated, applications are like 10x bloated. And it's even officially supported. Modern Android application require embedding something like megabyte of various "compat" libraries. I don't know how iOS state of things is, but in the past Swift runtime was required to embed as well (you could avoid it with Objective C, but that's so out of fashion). Another factor is cross-platform apps. Web app is still the most cross-platform solution. Also you can create and update web apps without gatekeepers approval.
  - ducktective 5y ago
    So essentially, it was a race between sand-boxing environments like JVM, .NET and browsers? I think there was a big potential for JVM to dominate this sector...
    - vbezhenar 5y ago
      Sandbox for JVM was mostly an afterthought IMO. There were lot of vulnerabilities to escape sandbox, much more compared to browsers. But nail in the coffin IMO was Steve Jobs, who decided not to adopt nor Flash, nor JVM in mobile Safari.
      - ducktective 5y ago
        It's amazing how much our everyday experiences are resulted from decisions of few people or completely random coincidences.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      There were earnest early attempts at making Java and .NET the language to run webapps, that all failed. For reasons. So, it wasn't for lack of trying. Javascript won by default, just by being slightly less nasty. Many of us run (selective) Javascript blockers to keep it from being too nasty. They don't always succeed.
  - incrudible 5y ago
    > Navigating to a web page is so much easier than installing an application. Perhaps, but I don't spend a lot of time installing applications, nor am I concerned about megabytes of disk usage. None of the web applications I use do anything particularly interesting - all of the interesting applications I use are not web apps. Web apps give maximum convenience to developers and sysadmins and in some cases, this is a worthwhile tradeoff, but often enough it just makes for an inferior product.
    - saurik 5y ago
      But the problem is that the premise of web falls apart if you have to install a separate app for every kind of content. I want to be able to have a hyperlink on my website to a TikTok video or an Instagram post and have people actually see it rather than go "ugh I have to install an app to see the content you are linking to". I want to be able to just click around the web without having to ever think about the boundaries between "apps". This is also why a lot of us hate authwalls: "oh god another account I need to set up"... it doesn't take much time to set up an account, but in a world where every single damned website would want an account you will never be done with it. The dual reasons then why you don't spend much time installing apps is because on the one side the web works well enough that people just link to stuff on the web and it works most of the time... and yet on the other side you also see people choose to centralize things into places that are easier to link stuff from, including apps people are more likely to have installed, which is a background force of centralization. The world people (like you) seem to want is one where the web is essentially dead and everyone just sits around in some subset of waller gardens that they don't really leave, with some minimal amount of hyperlinks available to get content in and out of other products. I have a link to a map, well, you better have Google Maps installed or it won't work. That just seems like a depressing failure of vision to me: the goal should be to get the web to the point where it replaces all of these stupid apps we have to have, so no one ever has to decide if an app is "installed or uninstalled" ever again: all content is immediately consumable at all times with nothing other than a URL. And we could be there if people with vested interests--like Apple--didn't stop actively trying to hobble web standards so people were forced to install more apps constantly.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  The point of sandboxing and ease of deployment. I don't want to run a separate program for each random site I visit.
paulgb 5y ago
When you say “we”, do you mean web users or developers? As a user, I'm sure happier that I don't have to deal with needy plugin installers (“what do you mean you don't want Bonzi Buddy?”).
staticassertion 5y ago
The problem is that the current state of operating systems is terrible. There's almost no isolation, tons of complexity, tons of attack surface, lock-in, etc. Browsers are a massive improvement as a platform for developing code, or at least they have the potential to be.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  It’s almost like operating systems should keep up or something.
  - TillE 5y ago
    It's really unfortunate that multiple attempts at capability-based microkernels have basically failed to come to fruition. There should be a FOSS OS with powerful OS-level security features, but it just hasn't happened.
    - nnamtr 5y ago
      I always thought that's what Fuchsia is about?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
      I think every major OS kernel (Windows NT, Linux, Darwin) actually has optional sophisticated security capabilities these days. I think the problem is that it's really hard to make these work nicely with legacy software? The whole classic UNIX-ish model sort of falls apart.
      - staticassertion 5y ago
        I assume by capabilities they mean specifically a capabilities-based security model.
pjmlp 5y ago
An opinion that I agree with, despite doing a lot of web development, but since Google basically wants to turn the Web into ChromeOS, with Microsoft's help, that is what it is.
jacob019 5y ago
While I share your nostalgia for the web of yore, it depends on the use case. The web browser is and has been an execution environment, long before WASM. Giving developers better low level tools unlocks more possibilities. I'm not really seeing the connection with applets/activex/flash. Sure you can do some things with WASM that you could do with those old tools, and much more.
grishka 5y ago
Writing JavaScript and making sure my web UI gets laid out exactly as I intend makes me feel like I'm making a UI in a word processor that has a very advanced macro system — but it's still a word processor at its core. Flash on the other hand felt more like a proper programming environment. A shame it was proprietary. And a big shame Adobe didn't open-source Flash Player after discontinuing it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
afavour 5y ago
“isolation” in that context is a little misleading - Flash had countless security vulnerabilities that blew open any isolation you might have hoped to achieve.
txdv 5y ago
Web Assembly is the secure web plugin
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Hardly when linear memory segments don't have protection against internal corruption.
  - txdv 5y ago
    Do you have some resource to read up on that?

Unpopular opinion: We would've been better off keeping web plugins and isolating those in a "click to play"-container rather than turning the web browser into an operating system.

nobody0 5y ago

This idea is not unpopular in hn I guess.

ducktective 5y ago

I mean what is the use of a "Web Browser" anyway? Couldn't each OS app communicate with its server over TCP/IP? At what point people decided HTML/CSS/JS is the epitome of user interaction for dynamic applications such as document editing, mapping and routing, media playing, chatting...?

gmueckl 5y ago
I think goes as far back as the dot com bubble when managers started to realize that it's easy to earn money by doing X, but on a website.
Santosh83 5y ago
I think because the document centric web was already there, the infrastructure was there, and it was much more easier to extend it than to come up with a million NIH solutions. Each app can communicate over its own protocol but the web allows interoperability and that is its greatest strength IMO.
vbezhenar 5y ago
Navigating to a web page is so much easier than installing an application. Even with modern operating systems like iOS. Despite the fact that web pages are getting more and more bloated, applications are like 10x bloated. And it's even officially supported. Modern Android application require embedding something like megabyte of various "compat" libraries. I don't know how iOS state of things is, but in the past Swift runtime was required to embed as well (you could avoid it with Objective C, but that's so out of fashion). Another factor is cross-platform apps. Web app is still the most cross-platform solution. Also you can create and update web apps without gatekeepers approval.
- ducktective 5y ago
  So essentially, it was a race between sand-boxing environments like JVM, .NET and browsers? I think there was a big potential for JVM to dominate this sector...
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Sandbox for JVM was mostly an afterthought IMO. There were lot of vulnerabilities to escape sandbox, much more compared to browsers. But nail in the coffin IMO was Steve Jobs, who decided not to adopt nor Flash, nor JVM in mobile Safari.
    - ducktective 5y ago
      It's amazing how much our everyday experiences are resulted from decisions of few people or completely random coincidences.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    There were earnest early attempts at making Java and .NET the language to run webapps, that all failed. For reasons. So, it wasn't for lack of trying. Javascript won by default, just by being slightly less nasty. Many of us run (selective) Javascript blockers to keep it from being too nasty. They don't always succeed.
- incrudible 5y ago
  > Navigating to a web page is so much easier than installing an application. Perhaps, but I don't spend a lot of time installing applications, nor am I concerned about megabytes of disk usage. None of the web applications I use do anything particularly interesting - all of the interesting applications I use are not web apps. Web apps give maximum convenience to developers and sysadmins and in some cases, this is a worthwhile tradeoff, but often enough it just makes for an inferior product.
  - saurik 5y ago
    But the problem is that the premise of web falls apart if you have to install a separate app for every kind of content. I want to be able to have a hyperlink on my website to a TikTok video or an Instagram post and have people actually see it rather than go "ugh I have to install an app to see the content you are linking to". I want to be able to just click around the web without having to ever think about the boundaries between "apps". This is also why a lot of us hate authwalls: "oh god another account I need to set up"... it doesn't take much time to set up an account, but in a world where every single damned website would want an account you will never be done with it. The dual reasons then why you don't spend much time installing apps is because on the one side the web works well enough that people just link to stuff on the web and it works most of the time... and yet on the other side you also see people choose to centralize things into places that are easier to link stuff from, including apps people are more likely to have installed, which is a background force of centralization. The world people (like you) seem to want is one where the web is essentially dead and everyone just sits around in some subset of waller gardens that they don't really leave, with some minimal amount of hyperlinks available to get content in and out of other products. I have a link to a map, well, you better have Google Maps installed or it won't work. That just seems like a depressing failure of vision to me: the goal should be to get the web to the point where it replaces all of these stupid apps we have to have, so no one ever has to decide if an app is "installed or uninstalled" ever again: all content is immediately consumable at all times with nothing other than a URL. And we could be there if people with vested interests--like Apple--didn't stop actively trying to hobble web standards so people were forced to install more apps constantly.
nextaccountic 5y ago
The point of sandboxing and ease of deployment. I don't want to run a separate program for each random site I visit.

paulgb 5y ago

When you say “we”, do you mean web users or developers? As a user, I'm sure happier that I don't have to deal with needy plugin installers (“what do you mean you don't want Bonzi Buddy?”).

staticassertion 5y ago

The problem is that the current state of operating systems is terrible. There's almost no isolation, tons of complexity, tons of attack surface, lock-in, etc. Browsers are a massive improvement as a platform for developing code, or at least they have the potential to be.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago
It’s almost like operating systems should keep up or something.
- TillE 5y ago
  It's really unfortunate that multiple attempts at capability-based microkernels have basically failed to come to fruition. There should be a FOSS OS with powerful OS-level security features, but it just hasn't happened.
  - nnamtr 5y ago
    I always thought that's what Fuchsia is about?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
    I think every major OS kernel (Windows NT, Linux, Darwin) actually has optional sophisticated security capabilities these days. I think the problem is that it's really hard to make these work nicely with legacy software? The whole classic UNIX-ish model sort of falls apart.
    - staticassertion 5y ago
      I assume by capabilities they mean specifically a capabilities-based security model.

pjmlp 5y ago

An opinion that I agree with, despite doing a lot of web development, but since Google basically wants to turn the Web into ChromeOS, with Microsoft's help, that is what it is.

jacob019 5y ago

While I share your nostalgia for the web of yore, it depends on the use case. The web browser is and has been an execution environment, long before WASM. Giving developers better low level tools unlocks more possibilities. I'm not really seeing the connection with applets/activex/flash. Sure you can do some things with WASM that you could do with those old tools, and much more.

grishka 5y ago

Writing JavaScript and making sure my web UI gets laid out exactly as I intend makes me feel like I'm making a UI in a word processor that has a very advanced macro system — but it's still a word processor at its core. Flash on the other hand felt more like a proper programming environment. A shame it was proprietary. And a big shame Adobe didn't open-source Flash Player after discontinuing it.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

afavour 5y ago

“isolation” in that context is a little misleading - Flash had countless security vulnerabilities that blew open any isolation you might have hoped to achieve.

txdv 5y ago

Web Assembly is the secure web plugin

pjmlp 5y ago
Hardly when linear memory segments don't have protection against internal corruption.
- txdv 5y ago
  Do you have some resource to read up on that?