5 ms·

Web browsers achieved all the dreams of Java developers. In fact, declaring to a newly wed college graduate that - back in olden days of yore - software had to

Web browsers achieved all the dreams of Java developers. In fact, declaring to a newly wed college graduate that - back in olden days of yore - software had to not only be downloaded, but it had to be hand built against each operating system, until a magic wonder called Java came around and abstracted those things. Then better browsers came and brought the Java into the browser, then finally javascript and rendering had reached enough maturity to implement essentially an entire operating system / virtual machine AS the browser, that java applets were gone. truly incredible in a sense

colechristensen 4y ago
But I also want just a document viewer. Great job building all that, developers of the world, now how can I read a news article or an email in a modern sense without a complicated machine executing code that’s not at all for my benefit. I do very little on the web where I actually want there to be code running on my document.
- RajT88 4y ago
  More news orgs should offer up something like lite.cnn.io.
- throwaway09432 4y ago
  >I do very little on the web where I actually want there to be code running on my document. Just some random examples, but how do you do your tax, pay your bills, buy/sell stuff online, make appointments etc?
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    None of those things require client side code other than an HTTP POST. Some things yes client side code makes sense, like an appointment finder, and that’s fine, but such things make up a tiny amount of my internet activity.
    - throwaway09432 4y ago
      Sure, but you are talking about a complete minimalist implementation, one that before all of this Javascript explosion, made people pull their hair out. For example you need javascript for dropdowns or form validation to begin with. I think there is a lot of stuff done by front end developers these days that people take for granted.
      - giantrobot 4y ago
        Drop downs do not require JavaScript. HTML has basic form validation and your POST endpoint needs to validate the form anyways, sending the form back to the user for corrections is not very difficult.
        throwaway09432 4y ago
        This is just the same argument as the comments upthread rehashed. In the absolute most minimalist, hair pullingly annoying implementation, that is correct. However the polish you are used to on dropdowns plus countless other controls you interact with every day require javascript.
        still_grokking 4y ago
        > However the polish you are used to on dropdowns plus countless other controls you interact with every day require javascript. Or just a proper GUI framework not based on HTML.
        dmitriid 4y ago
        > However the polish you are used to on dropdowns Emphatically no. The absolute vast majority of those "polished dropdowns" are horrible to use, and break all possible platform conventions (for example, not accessible or usable with a keyboard) > countless other controls you interact with every day require javascript. Very few, if any, "polished controls" used on the absolute vast majority of web sites require javascript.
  - wtetzner 4y ago
    Can’t all of that be done with simple form submissions?
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    How did the people do all of that without the modern web? How could humanity actually survive so long without web browsers? If you think about that maybe you come also to some conclusions regarding the questions you just asked.
    - throwaway09432 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - still_grokking 4y ago
        Which just strengthens my point.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
goatlover 4y ago
Couldn't Java (the JVM) or .Net have technically accomplished the same thing earlier if web browsers didn't already exist? Java was much bigger than applets. Bill Gates recognized the threat of both Netscape and Sun to the windows dominance, because of the possibility of running apps over the internet. Maybe even Smalltalk in the 80s if Kay and company had foreseen the rise of the global internet back in the 70s.
- rektide 4y ago
  Java applets versus HTML DOM is a debatably parallel competition, but the web was also a connected & online medium, with it's own protocol, and that begat interoperability & connectivity to a degree that applications never came anywhere close to. Ironically, for all the fragmented wild ecosystem of webdev today, with a million different libraries & toolchains & frameworks, the web has maintained & iterated on a very consistent & coherent underpinning that is fundamentally cross-computer, that is globally connected via the url. Applications were always a lesser beast, damned by lower horizons, and if they dared to try to do more, were on their own with no other applications to interoperate across & on their own with their protocols. The web grew many UI development options atop consistent DOM and protocols, but the application had consistent UI development options across scattered connectivity protocols, if any (and often none). Looking at the internet as an application delivery platform ignores that the web grew because it was both an application and content delivery system, interwoven, together, and infinitely remixable & extensible.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    Applets relied on the browser. I’m talking about using Java or languages targeting the JVM outside of the browser as applications communicating over network protocols to deliver content and communicate. Java was designed with networking in mind. Applets were added to Netscape because the browser and web had become popular. But Java itself was positioned to be an application delivery platform over the internet.
    - rektide 4y ago
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Incredible, but also incredibly wasteful. Often websites send our CPU fans spinning for stuff, that should not even wake up a CPU fan. In that regard the browser ecosystem needs to seriously lose weight. We have more powerful machines than ever, but we are wasting their potential to no end with fat bloated web apps.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Maybe there will be a W3C spec for perf profiles. No js, no dynamic css, PDF life interactions. Maybe that is stupid, but with that information your browser can go into a different, near zero power, mode.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    Didn't Google's AMP project set out to achieve something similar? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages (albeit as a bit of a walled garden) Personally I almost wish that the majority of sites out there didn't pretend like they need to be highly dynamic, interactive and inevitably wasteful experiences.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      Google's AMP project was Google's weapon against Facebook's instant news or whatever it was called. It had nothing to do with a quest for better performance. It had everything to do with ad impressions.
      - 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
        As it happens, AMP pages look great in the text-only browser I use and are also an easy solution to many "paywalls". (The text-only browser does not autoload resources, run JS or process CSS.) Even without a browser, it is easy to request AMP pages using a command line utility, extract strings enclosed with "<p></p>" and produce an even smaller, readable web page with no ads.
      - 4y ago
seagreen 4y ago
That's the glory of web browsers: 1-click sandboxed installation of programs on demand. This is incredible! > enough maturity to implement essentially an entire operating system / virtual machine AS the browser Yes, an operating system-- but one without user-facing persistence! Only per-application, networked, silo'd persistence, where the user sees a rendered form of data but not the data itself. IMHO these two facts, that a) Web browsers are BETTER than Linux, Windows, etc as an OS in a very important way, package management and b) They're missing one of the primary features of an OS, persistence overshadow any other facts about them. What a strange tool they are.
- jayjader 4y ago
  I would temper your message with the caveat that the data is still accessible to the user; one click to open devtools, and another to switch to the "Storage" tab, and you have all your persisted data visible to the user. You can copy and/or edit said data from that view as well! Albeit the convention is clearly to not presume your browser app user will be interacting with their data at _all_ through the devtools, which I find regrettable but unavoidable with the current state of "computer literacy" and the state of "devtools-as-an-interface" (obviously the ergonomics aren't great for the average user today).
  - seagreen 4y ago
    That's likely just a keyhole view into your data though. Eg take web forums (not this one since there's weird lisp stuff down there and I don't know how it works, but the average web forum). On the app (server) side they have access to everything, all of your posts in nice beautiful structured SQL. On the user side you have access to none of that, just HTML soup and maybe some cached stuff in the "Storage" tab, or maybe not. > Albeit the convention is clearly to not presume your browser app user will be interacting with their data at _all_ through the devtools, which I find regrettable but unavoidable with the current state of "computer literacy" and the state of "devtools-as-an-interface" (obviously the ergonomics aren't great for the average user today). I really like your use of "convention" and "presume" here, because I think that's the essential lens to view these things through. It's absolutely possible for an app to provide all of a user's data in a nice structured form in IndexedDB, that will just be rare because it's not the convention.
vba616 4y ago
>software had to not only be downloaded, but it had to be hand built against each operating system Back in the day, we didn't even have modems or compilers, let alone internet - so we would go to Ye Olde Computer Store and copy the disks of Fred Fish. That was how I got my first experience of Hack, which was great, and Emacs, which has always been a WTF for me. I wonder if for some reason computer hardware had stopped getting faster and more complex at the stage of, say, a 25 MHz 486, how much different the world would be, or whether it would just force software to be consistently purged of cruft.
pjmlp 4y ago
I surely did not dream with Web browsers, additionally plenty of bytecode languages predate Java, with Pascal's P-Code being the most well known one. Back in the day there were several P-Code aware platforms.

colechristensen 4y ago

But I also want just a document viewer. Great job building all that, developers of the world, now how can I read a news article or an email in a modern sense without a complicated machine executing code that’s not at all for my benefit. I do very little on the web where I actually want there to be code running on my document.

RajT88 4y ago
More news orgs should offer up something like lite.cnn.io.
throwaway09432 4y ago
>I do very little on the web where I actually want there to be code running on my document. Just some random examples, but how do you do your tax, pay your bills, buy/sell stuff online, make appointments etc?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  None of those things require client side code other than an HTTP POST. Some things yes client side code makes sense, like an appointment finder, and that’s fine, but such things make up a tiny amount of my internet activity.
  - throwaway09432 4y ago
    Sure, but you are talking about a complete minimalist implementation, one that before all of this Javascript explosion, made people pull their hair out. For example you need javascript for dropdowns or form validation to begin with. I think there is a lot of stuff done by front end developers these days that people take for granted.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      Drop downs do not require JavaScript. HTML has basic form validation and your POST endpoint needs to validate the form anyways, sending the form back to the user for corrections is not very difficult.
      - throwaway09432 4y ago
        This is just the same argument as the comments upthread rehashed. In the absolute most minimalist, hair pullingly annoying implementation, that is correct. However the polish you are used to on dropdowns plus countless other controls you interact with every day require javascript.
        still_grokking 4y ago
        > However the polish you are used to on dropdowns plus countless other controls you interact with every day require javascript. Or just a proper GUI framework not based on HTML.
        dmitriid 4y ago
        > However the polish you are used to on dropdowns Emphatically no. The absolute vast majority of those "polished dropdowns" are horrible to use, and break all possible platform conventions (for example, not accessible or usable with a keyboard) > countless other controls you interact with every day require javascript. Very few, if any, "polished controls" used on the absolute vast majority of web sites require javascript.
- wtetzner 4y ago
  Can’t all of that be done with simple form submissions?
- still_grokking 4y ago
  How did the people do all of that without the modern web? How could humanity actually survive so long without web browsers? If you think about that maybe you come also to some conclusions regarding the questions you just asked.
  - throwaway09432 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - still_grokking 4y ago
      Which just strengthens my point.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

goatlover 4y ago

Couldn't Java (the JVM) or .Net have technically accomplished the same thing earlier if web browsers didn't already exist? Java was much bigger than applets. Bill Gates recognized the threat of both Netscape and Sun to the windows dominance, because of the possibility of running apps over the internet. Maybe even Smalltalk in the 80s if Kay and company had foreseen the rise of the global internet back in the 70s.

rektide 4y ago
Java applets versus HTML DOM is a debatably parallel competition, but the web was also a connected & online medium, with it's own protocol, and that begat interoperability & connectivity to a degree that applications never came anywhere close to. Ironically, for all the fragmented wild ecosystem of webdev today, with a million different libraries & toolchains & frameworks, the web has maintained & iterated on a very consistent & coherent underpinning that is fundamentally cross-computer, that is globally connected via the url. Applications were always a lesser beast, damned by lower horizons, and if they dared to try to do more, were on their own with no other applications to interoperate across & on their own with their protocols. The web grew many UI development options atop consistent DOM and protocols, but the application had consistent UI development options across scattered connectivity protocols, if any (and often none). Looking at the internet as an application delivery platform ignores that the web grew because it was both an application and content delivery system, interwoven, together, and infinitely remixable & extensible.
- goatlover 4y ago
  Applets relied on the browser. I’m talking about using Java or languages targeting the JVM outside of the browser as applications communicating over network protocols to deliver content and communicate. Java was designed with networking in mind. Applets were added to Netscape because the browser and web had become popular. But Java itself was positioned to be an application delivery platform over the internet.
  - rektide 4y ago

zelphirkalt 4y ago

Incredible, but also incredibly wasteful. Often websites send our CPU fans spinning for stuff, that should not even wake up a CPU fan. In that regard the browser ecosystem needs to seriously lose weight. We have more powerful machines than ever, but we are wasting their potential to no end with fat bloated web apps.

agumonkey 4y ago
Maybe there will be a W3C spec for perf profiles. No js, no dynamic css, PDF life interactions. Maybe that is stupid, but with that information your browser can go into a different, near zero power, mode.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  Didn't Google's AMP project set out to achieve something similar? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages (albeit as a bit of a walled garden) Personally I almost wish that the majority of sites out there didn't pretend like they need to be highly dynamic, interactive and inevitably wasteful experiences.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Google's AMP project was Google's weapon against Facebook's instant news or whatever it was called. It had nothing to do with a quest for better performance. It had everything to do with ad impressions.
    - 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
      As it happens, AMP pages look great in the text-only browser I use and are also an easy solution to many "paywalls". (The text-only browser does not autoload resources, run JS or process CSS.) Even without a browser, it is easy to request AMP pages using a command line utility, extract strings enclosed with "<p></p>" and produce an even smaller, readable web page with no ads.
    - 4y ago

seagreen 4y ago

That's the glory of web browsers: 1-click sandboxed installation of programs on demand. This is incredible! > enough maturity to implement essentially an entire operating system / virtual machine AS the browser Yes, an operating system-- but one without user-facing persistence! Only per-application, networked, silo'd persistence, where the user sees a rendered form of data but not the data itself. IMHO these two facts, that a) Web browsers are BETTER than Linux, Windows, etc as an OS in a very important way, package management and b) They're missing one of the primary features of an OS, persistence overshadow any other facts about them. What a strange tool they are.

jayjader 4y ago
I would temper your message with the caveat that the data is still accessible to the user; one click to open devtools, and another to switch to the "Storage" tab, and you have all your persisted data visible to the user. You can copy and/or edit said data from that view as well! Albeit the convention is clearly to not presume your browser app user will be interacting with their data at _all_ through the devtools, which I find regrettable but unavoidable with the current state of "computer literacy" and the state of "devtools-as-an-interface" (obviously the ergonomics aren't great for the average user today).
- seagreen 4y ago
  That's likely just a keyhole view into your data though. Eg take web forums (not this one since there's weird lisp stuff down there and I don't know how it works, but the average web forum). On the app (server) side they have access to everything, all of your posts in nice beautiful structured SQL. On the user side you have access to none of that, just HTML soup and maybe some cached stuff in the "Storage" tab, or maybe not. > Albeit the convention is clearly to not presume your browser app user will be interacting with their data at _all_ through the devtools, which I find regrettable but unavoidable with the current state of "computer literacy" and the state of "devtools-as-an-interface" (obviously the ergonomics aren't great for the average user today). I really like your use of "convention" and "presume" here, because I think that's the essential lens to view these things through. It's absolutely possible for an app to provide all of a user's data in a nice structured form in IndexedDB, that will just be rare because it's not the convention.

vba616 4y ago

>software had to not only be downloaded, but it had to be hand built against each operating system Back in the day, we didn't even have modems or compilers, let alone internet - so we would go to Ye Olde Computer Store and copy the disks of Fred Fish. That was how I got my first experience of Hack, which was great, and Emacs, which has always been a WTF for me. I wonder if for some reason computer hardware had stopped getting faster and more complex at the stage of, say, a 25 MHz 486, how much different the world would be, or whether it would just force software to be consistently purged of cruft.

pjmlp 4y ago

I surely did not dream with Web browsers, additionally plenty of bytecode languages predate Java, with Pascal's P-Code being the most well known one. Back in the day there were several P-Code aware platforms.