> In its early days, the web was markup. The browser was to meant to display text with some basic formatting and hyperlinks. At some point in the later evolutio

> In its early days, the web was markup. The browser was to meant to display text with some basic formatting and hyperlinks. At some point in the later evolution, JavaScript was created, allowing websites to dynamically change their content on the device. What happened in the meantime? A mess. No. Evolution happened. Look I was with the author when they started with the Topics API Google shoved into Chrome and I also share the concern about the web turning into chromium but then they go to pretend this isn’t want users wanted. It’s exactly what users wanted, maybe not tech nerds but general users do want these changes by and large. I mean you aren’t going to find anyone who likes that news sites have a million trackers and download MB of data to track and advertise to you but if we set that aside and focus on WebApps (which news sites aren’t) then yes, that’s what people want. I get frustrated with people who appear to pine for the days of the web being just “documents”, before the “evil JavaScript”. Just because something grows and changes doesn’t make it bad and if all you could is browse documents on the web then it wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is today. People don’t want these changes? Bullshit, they prove over and over again they absolutely do. People want WebApps. Yes, people will complain about subscriptions but they complained about software upgrades as well so I don’t see a difference. People complain about any kind of change if we stopped progress anytime people complained we’d get nowhere. This is going to sound controversial but the best skill you can hone is knowing which complaints to ignore. Not all complaints are valid and sometimes your loudest complainers are the ones you need to ignore most. Getting back to things in the article, Office 365 (which I personally don’t use) and friends are way better than “our IT dept hasn’t upgraded Office in 6 years” and that’s IF you have an IT dept that isn’t the boss’ kid helping out a bit. SMB don’t have IT departments normally or they outsource it, Office 365 really isn’t that expensive given what you get from it (same with Google Workspace). Yes, you pay a subscription or “rent” but it means you don’t have to maintain or manage the process. To many people, especially here on HN, write that off and frankly it’s embarrassing. Just because you can do something yourself doesn’t mean you should. It’s an arbitrary line they draw in the sand and with all arbitrary lines, it’s gets absurd when you move it (should you write your software for everything because you can? Should you haul your own water instead of paying “rent” to the water company?).