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> Is there any chance of a hard fork? What about, let's say, a web 1.1 where we intentionally remove all the fancy new web APIs and mostly revert back to what w
by pravus 3y ago
> Is there any chance of a hard fork? What about, let's say, a web 1.1 where we intentionally remove all the fancy new web APIs and mostly revert back to what we had in the late 90s?
Sure. It's really just a matter of mass appeal. We could fork the existing browser base and eliminate the new attestation API. Some projects are already doing this from what I understand.
What will keep attestation from being used is websites will lose business if their customers can't access the site. We went through this with user-agent string checking in the 90's/00's when IE and Netscape/Mozilla were at war and every site had a very strong opinion on which browser they would support. Even today you occasionally see sites that will hit you with "unsupported browser" errors if you aren't running a specific version of something.
The solution to this was everyone realized they were throwing money away by excluding a large portion of their customer base. At the time no single browser really dominated the market share so it was easy to see that an IE-only site was losing 33% of internet traffic. These days everything is basically chrome-based so this hasn't been as much of an issue.
So in the future we'll see this same thing. Non-attestable browsers will be locked out of attested sites and it will be a numbers game to see if sites want to risk losing these customers/viewers.
At the end of the day, you have to remember that everything on the web is just a TCP socket and some HTTP which is a flexible text protocol. We can build pretty much anything we want but it takes inertia to keep it going.
- fleventynine 3y ago> non-attestable browsers will be locked out of attested sites and it will be a numbers game to see if sites want to risk losing these customers/viewers. Rather than being completely blocked, I think non-attestable browsers will be subject to more CAPTCHAs and other annoyances, similar to what TOR users see today from anti-DDOS services. Perhaps ad-supported services using large amounts of bandwidth will decide not to support non-attested users, since the ad revenue from those isn't enough to pay for the bandwidth. What I would like to see is a solution for anonymous microtransactions, so web sites have a monetary incentive to serve users who want to use a non-attestable browser (and don't want to see ads).