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> Software gets more complicated. All of this complexity is there for a reason. Not any good reason, imo. There used to be incentives for efficiency in various
by travisgriggs 2y ago
> Software gets more complicated. All of this complexity is there for a reason.
Not any good reason, imo. There used to be incentives for efficiency in various aspects of the field. Scarcity of talent, scarcity of bandwidth and compute power, scarcity of budgets.
Twenty years of “let’s all be programmers”, unhinged amounts of money, and design by committee, have rendered it a very complex world.
- hx8 2y agoI disagree. We add complexity largely (but not exclusively) because they fix problems. The entire point of a web browser exists to solve the very complex problem "How do we run arbitrary code on client hardware in a way that's safe for all parties?"
- skydhash 2y agoWhat’s about sharing documents which is still it’s primary purpose. And most of the current complexity stems from the sprawling JS API surface. We know how to sandbox software (VM and malware analysis,…), browser’s complexity is mostly corporate driven.
- bluecheese452 2y agoI don’t think that has been its primary purpose for a long time. If you want to share a document for the most part you email it. It has long since moved from documents to applications.
- layer8 2y agos/sharing/publishing/ The web was never much used for sharing documents in the emailing sense.
- hx8 2y agoI had forgotten the original purpose of web browsers was to view hyperlinked documents. It seems like we abandoned that as the primary use case over 20 years ago, with technology such as Flash, Silverlight, and Java Weblets.
- jakub_g 2y agoLet me update what the OP wrote: "How do we run arbitrary code on client hardware in a way that's safe for all parties and without installation step?" 15+ years ago, installing software on customers' machines could take days of efforts of dedicated teams. Today it mostly "just works".
- marcosdumay 2y agoVMS was a sandbox-based OS released in the 70s that solved "how do we run arbitrary code on client hardware in a way that's safe for all parties?" Browsers are not that. Browsers do have this component, but that's not the reason they exist.
- sureglymop 2y agoI wonder how productive it is to mention that though. Sure, that may not be the reason they exist and came to be (something about exchanging documents) but it may be how they are mostly used today.
- marcosdumay 2y agoYou are insisting on justifying all of the complexity of browsers by claiming the same functionality that people got in the 70's with a small OS that was hand-written in assembly. Sorry, but you don't seem to want a productive discussion. You just have a preconceived idea that turns out to be wrong.
- sureglymop 2y agoI am not insisting anything. I wanted to point out that the "reason why browsers exist/came to exist" can be relevant in this discussion but is not a direct logical contradiction to their current complexity. If I say, the pdf came to be in order to be a simple way to digitally represent printed/printable documents that may be correct but wouldn't actually express anything about the current complexity of the pdf format. Admittedly perhaps a bad example due to how similar it is. It's possible I misunderstood though. If so, I apologize.
- travisgriggs 2y agoPerhaps I was a bit hyperbolic. Some subset of added complexity is justified as the problems we’ve tried to solve have gotten more complex. Another subset is added complexity for the reasons I listed (no good feedback loops to prevent it), which is imo not good. I also feel that this subset is larger than the first subset.
- mrheosuper 2y agoand do you think having 20+ different of JS framework is the way to solve it ?