4 ms·
Ask HN: Do we need Web Browsers?
Mind you my rent has been paid via web work the past 4/5ish years. I'm your average Joe Schlomo - the JS slinger.
However, it has dawned upon me - do we really need web browsers. yeah they abstract a lot of things and make things compatible between different computers.
But if we take a step back - browsers simply display text, play videos + other shit (which could be made native). [majority of the time]
if the majority of the time, we're displaying text on the web - why not curl then pipe the returned text stream to our favorite text reader/ editor. Then if I have notes, I wanna make on the page - I can simply edit and save a local copy. Thereby skipping the 30 million + lines of code shipped with Chrome/Firefox.
To me it seems really inefficient that we've millions of code lines sitting between passing two text files between 2 computers. Hell even videos/audio.
- codevark 4y ago
- egfx 4y agoWhat you described is the read only web. I think we’re 2 internet versions past this. 4 according to Twitter.
- floxy 4y agoSince every web page is now essentially an application anyway, I'm surprised that no one has tried distributing smalltalk-like executable images. With an wasm interpreter for "legacy" web-browser users.
- tgflynn 4y agoBrowsers solve the compatibility problem (ie. write once run everywhere) and they do it better than any other technology that has yet been devised. Java tried to do that back in the 90's with Applets but it never really caught on. I do find it unfortunate that a lot of sites, who's main purpose is to display some text, take advantage of the power of javascript to make the reading experience nearly as annoying as possible.
- wmf 4y agoYou'd love Gemini.
- dzonga 4y agodo you mean https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi ? if so looks interesting so far due to the quick browse through
- cratermoon 4y agoSomething like https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/web-first-and-second-browser/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/web-first-and-second-browser/ maybe?
- nathants 4y agomobile safari. is needed. yes.