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Ask HN: What Will Replace the Browser?
Hi HN,
I know about old tech like gopher, but has there been or is there any project that is developing the replacement for hypertext and the browser? It seems things are heading that way with wasm and pwa's.
- timonoko 5y agoApropos. Is it possible that there will be a "HTML-phone" in the future with Fuchsia and all that sheite? It would be so much more comprehensible, if the homepage in my Phone is just a local web page, just like in a chromebook.
- jhoelzel 5y agoI believe a lot of people have already thought about this. Especially MS likes the internet since the first asp.net MVC iteration. But the reality is that we build Apps because they need to be approved and are not easily changeable after approval. With html/js all that is stopping you from editing your phone is notepad. This should be awesome but ultimately scary for a device you trust. Who is going to buy a phone without guarantees? Because I dont think anybody would be able to protect your homescreen from all the malladies that are possible with modern html.
- jschveibinz 5y agoI would venture to guess that whatever the implementation, it will need to support the revenue stream needed from advertising, whether that is through text, graphics, or other audio/visual presentation.
- muzani 5y agoKindle and app stores are an interesting alternative. It's still advertising, but in very different ways. Kindle advertises stuff it's selling, app stores utilize microtransactions, right next to the ads.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoAre you talking about captive portals or SAAS that require apps? Apple App Store, or iMessage might be one example, WhatsApp, FB messenger, Oculus VR, or some hardware like Juicero or Keurig?
- muzani 5y agoAnything that replaces a browser. A Kindle "browses" other books. Smart TVs look for videos. These things can go beyond that, to the rest of the internet, but the ads are on the front door. I'm not sure whether you can browse something on a Juicero though.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoIt was a hardware/physical type of lock, its the same idea but its not as online. Do you think most are just web interfaces? They seem closed but not always serving exclusive content, but something like iMessage or WhatsApp will not allow you to port out of the service.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoApps like Snapchat that have a captive model
- brudgers 5y agoThere's a bit of conceptual comingling in the question. It is true that browsers replaced gopher clients. But it wasn't an either or. Until everything became (more or less) Chrome rather recently, browsers handled the gopher protocol just as browsers largely replaced FTP clients. (Opera used to also handle email until it went webkit). Mathematically, gopher and the world wide web are both directed graphs. In a Turing tarpit sense, gopher could be bent to do what the web does in terms of information retrieval and indexing. The early web looked pretty much like gopher. Not just CERN but Yahoo! too (and even the HN frontpage today). The web won in part because people wrote for the web protocol by default instead of gopher when the internet exploded in the mid 1990's. So in an important sense, replacing the web means finding something more useful than a directed graph. That's non-obvious. In the technical literal sense, the browser is most likely to replace the browser. When a new capability is wanted, it gets added to the browser. The browser has always handled multiple protocols. Browsers that handled HTTPS replace browsers that don't. Browsers that handle HTTP2 replace browsers that don't. And so on.