4 ms·

The "weaponization of complexity" is real—modern web standards are an endless labyrinth of APIs, performance optimizations, and security requirements. Large pla

The "weaponization of complexity" is real—modern web standards are an endless labyrinth of APIs, performance optimizations, and security requirements. Large players like Google have the resources to dictate how the web evolves, while any newcomer faces insurmountable hurdles in achieving compatibility, security, and speed. Even major tech companies have tried and failed (e.g., Microsoft ditching EdgeHTML for Chromium). Can anyone do anything about it? Google’s control is inevitable. No one can meaningfully compete with Google in the long run. Keeping up with compatibility alone is a full-time job for massive teams—which is why even Microsoft gave up on EdgeHTML and switched to Chromium.

codedokode 2y ago
You put the blame on Google but isn't it your fault, people who get excited every time a new feature gets added to web standards, and developers who use it? Like CSS masonry, or WebRTC, or web components with shadow DOM? Features like this get lot of upvotes here.
- bartread 2y ago
  This is the truth of it: if people chose Firefox, or another alternative, over Chrome then Google would have less power to impose its will on the web. This would be a good thing. Google’s power on the web doesn’t simply come from having lots of money and resources - see, as examples, any of the multitude of Google’s failures and shuttered products - but mostly comes from its reach. “Everybody” uses Chrome. If that were no longer true, progress on the web could return to a more open an collaborative model. Anyone can help that happen simply by switching to Firefox, as I did four or five years ago.
  - pmontra 2y ago
    I never used Chrome much. I think I jumped from IE5 to Firefox. IE6 only for testing web apps. Frankly nearly everything has been working well in Firefox for a long time. The only two sources of problems are: 1) Long tail experimental sites that use or want to demonstrate some new technology. I find most of them on the home page of HN. 2) Myself and the security/privacy plugins I use. They break some web pages, especially ecommerce and payment workflows. I either go hunting for the correct combination of permissions in uMatrix (I would become crazy soon if I used uBlock Origin for that) or I use that very site in Chrome and the close it. Major ecommerce sites don't have any problem. The long tail ones are weirder in their choice of third parties. However that's an issue that any browser would have, it's not because of Firefox.
stakhanov 2y ago
> Can anyone do anything about it? Yes, Donald Trump can, because these are all American companies. If he pushes the rest of the world hard enough, the amount of will and the amount of resource that will be mobilized to get out from under the thumb of U.S. tech domination will be something none of us has ever seen in their lifetimes.
jfoster 2y ago
With the way that AI is unfolding right now, this might be an outdated problem fairly soon. In 2026 if you can just tell your AI to build a new full-featured browser before you go to sleep, you might have something in the morning.
- berkes 2y ago
  AI might be heading towards a situation where you can "tell it to build a full featured browser". But this narrative is naive at best, and frankly, getting annoying too. Especially because it gets repeated by people who know even less about "programming" than those who start this idea in the first place. That AI cannot maintain this browser. It cannot monitor and fix performance issues. It won't be able to refactor stuff when the umpteenth web-api changes or lands. It cannot architecture the modules so that it can actually do this maintainance either. Generative AI is fantastic at generating stuff. It's terrible at maintaining, changing, tweaking. It's even worse at understanding what you mean with "It must have want a way to disable cookie popups" because that's both ambiguous, and actually the wrong instruction to begin with - for example. We must stop repeating "AI will be able to program our software for us very soon" because "programming software" is very little about churning out new code. As every programmer with a few years under their belt will know. What AI is good at, though, is enabling those programmers to be far more effective, efficient. To lower the barrier of entry. etc. But I'm 101% confident that no AI will "write a full-featured browser" that will continue to run for over half a month and/or one OS update.
  - Philpax 2y ago
    I mean, the goal is to get it to a state where it can do those things. There are benchmarks for autonomously resolving issues that are being hill-climbed as we speak: https://www.swebench.com/ https://www.swebench.com/ I don't know how far away it is, but never say never.
  - jfoster 2y ago
    What is the fundamental limitation that prevents AI from ever doing the maintenance tasks that you mentioned? Current AI cannot, of course, but the trajectory seems to be that it will be able to do such things better & faster than any human can.
DannyBee 2y ago
The "weaponization of complexity" as you call it is simply "work is done by those who show up". Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc took the horribly dastardly approach of "participating" and then "doing the work". The horror. Microsoft gave up because it wasn't worth it when someone else was willing to do the work. It was not something that was adding value to them by them doing it themselves anymore. It's hilarious to try to pain this as some evil dastardly thing where they badly tried to keep up and just failed because it's just so hard and costly vs something where it just wasn't worth them paying for because they didn't derive enough value from it. Remind me which earnings call it was where they were saying "you know, we are going to issue rough q4 guidance because we think it's going to be really hard to implement these next 3 CSS features" The cost of keeping up for them, even now, if they started again, would be a rounding error in any MS VP's overall equity refresh budget (IE the money they are giving out in stock per year to employees in their org). So please, let's not pretend it's too "hard" or "expensive" for them. In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened. If you think you can do it better, or that it doesn't need to be this complex, or whatever, awesome. show up and do it, like everyone else did. The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity". Calling it that is just plain lazy. Almost all improvements and backwards compatibility shims make it harder for someone else to implement from scratch. That's because the primary goal is usually to help users. I mean, why stop with the web with this argument? How come the Go folks weaponized the Go language by adding generics? By making it harder for me to implement my own, they've weaponized it against me! I can't believe nobody has stopped their dastardly deeds.
- zanderwohl 2y ago
  This reads like a semi-incoherent essay from someone who doesn't really understand what complexity is and has a chip on their shoulder about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
  - 2y ago
hnuser123456 2y ago
How much of Edge switching to Chromium was a way for MS to shoot themselves in the foot and focus monopoly discussions on Google instead of themselves?
bloppe 2y ago
Clearly this is a common sentiment, but none of the comments on this post seem to provide any evidence of it. The W3C has hundreds of members. Does Google really sideline them all? Are there specific examples where Google strong-armed the others to develop self serving standards? I'm not talking about Topics API, because that's not a standard. AFAICT all of Google's sketchy chrome features have never affected me as a happy Firefox user.

codedokode 2y ago

You put the blame on Google but isn't it your fault, people who get excited every time a new feature gets added to web standards, and developers who use it? Like CSS masonry, or WebRTC, or web components with shadow DOM? Features like this get lot of upvotes here.

bartread 2y ago
This is the truth of it: if people chose Firefox, or another alternative, over Chrome then Google would have less power to impose its will on the web. This would be a good thing. Google’s power on the web doesn’t simply come from having lots of money and resources - see, as examples, any of the multitude of Google’s failures and shuttered products - but mostly comes from its reach. “Everybody” uses Chrome. If that were no longer true, progress on the web could return to a more open an collaborative model. Anyone can help that happen simply by switching to Firefox, as I did four or five years ago.
- pmontra 2y ago
  I never used Chrome much. I think I jumped from IE5 to Firefox. IE6 only for testing web apps. Frankly nearly everything has been working well in Firefox for a long time. The only two sources of problems are: 1) Long tail experimental sites that use or want to demonstrate some new technology. I find most of them on the home page of HN. 2) Myself and the security/privacy plugins I use. They break some web pages, especially ecommerce and payment workflows. I either go hunting for the correct combination of permissions in uMatrix (I would become crazy soon if I used uBlock Origin for that) or I use that very site in Chrome and the close it. Major ecommerce sites don't have any problem. The long tail ones are weirder in their choice of third parties. However that's an issue that any browser would have, it's not because of Firefox.

stakhanov 2y ago

> Can anyone do anything about it? Yes, Donald Trump can, because these are all American companies. If he pushes the rest of the world hard enough, the amount of will and the amount of resource that will be mobilized to get out from under the thumb of U.S. tech domination will be something none of us has ever seen in their lifetimes.

jfoster 2y ago

With the way that AI is unfolding right now, this might be an outdated problem fairly soon. In 2026 if you can just tell your AI to build a new full-featured browser before you go to sleep, you might have something in the morning.

berkes 2y ago
AI might be heading towards a situation where you can "tell it to build a full featured browser". But this narrative is naive at best, and frankly, getting annoying too. Especially because it gets repeated by people who know even less about "programming" than those who start this idea in the first place. That AI cannot maintain this browser. It cannot monitor and fix performance issues. It won't be able to refactor stuff when the umpteenth web-api changes or lands. It cannot architecture the modules so that it can actually do this maintainance either. Generative AI is fantastic at generating stuff. It's terrible at maintaining, changing, tweaking. It's even worse at understanding what you mean with "It must have want a way to disable cookie popups" because that's both ambiguous, and actually the wrong instruction to begin with - for example. We must stop repeating "AI will be able to program our software for us very soon" because "programming software" is very little about churning out new code. As every programmer with a few years under their belt will know. What AI is good at, though, is enabling those programmers to be far more effective, efficient. To lower the barrier of entry. etc. But I'm 101% confident that no AI will "write a full-featured browser" that will continue to run for over half a month and/or one OS update.
- Philpax 2y ago
  I mean, the goal is to get it to a state where it can do those things. There are benchmarks for autonomously resolving issues that are being hill-climbed as we speak: https://www.swebench.com/ https://www.swebench.com/ I don't know how far away it is, but never say never.
- jfoster 2y ago
  What is the fundamental limitation that prevents AI from ever doing the maintenance tasks that you mentioned? Current AI cannot, of course, but the trajectory seems to be that it will be able to do such things better & faster than any human can.

DannyBee 2y ago

The "weaponization of complexity" as you call it is simply "work is done by those who show up". Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, etc took the horribly dastardly approach of "participating" and then "doing the work". The horror. Microsoft gave up because it wasn't worth it when someone else was willing to do the work. It was not something that was adding value to them by them doing it themselves anymore. It's hilarious to try to pain this as some evil dastardly thing where they badly tried to keep up and just failed because it's just so hard and costly vs something where it just wasn't worth them paying for because they didn't derive enough value from it. Remind me which earnings call it was where they were saying "you know, we are going to issue rough q4 guidance because we think it's going to be really hard to implement these next 3 CSS features" The cost of keeping up for them, even now, if they started again, would be a rounding error in any MS VP's overall equity refresh budget (IE the money they are giving out in stock per year to employees in their org). So please, let's not pretend it's too "hard" or "expensive" for them. In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened. If you think you can do it better, or that it doesn't need to be this complex, or whatever, awesome. show up and do it, like everyone else did. The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity". Calling it that is just plain lazy. Almost all improvements and backwards compatibility shims make it harder for someone else to implement from scratch. That's because the primary goal is usually to help users. I mean, why stop with the web with this argument? How come the Go folks weaponized the Go language by adding generics? By making it harder for me to implement my own, they've weaponized it against me! I can't believe nobody has stopped their dastardly deeds.

zanderwohl 2y ago
This reads like a semi-incoherent essay from someone who doesn't really understand what complexity is and has a chip on their shoulder about something completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
- 2y ago

hnuser123456 2y ago

How much of Edge switching to Chromium was a way for MS to shoot themselves in the foot and focus monopoly discussions on Google instead of themselves?

bloppe 2y ago

Clearly this is a common sentiment, but none of the comments on this post seem to provide any evidence of it. The W3C has hundreds of members. Does Google really sideline them all? Are there specific examples where Google strong-armed the others to develop self serving standards? I'm not talking about Topics API, because that's not a standard. AFAICT all of Google's sketchy chrome features have never affected me as a happy Firefox user.