7 ms·
On the surface, it's easy to agree with your opinion. But then I think, what would it have been like without this investment. Maybe browsers would stay buggy a
by taftster 1y ago
On the surface, it's easy to agree with your opinion.
But then I think, what would it have been like without this investment. Maybe browsers would stay buggy and we'd have an internet with much more diversity in protocol. The internet of today is monotone and subservient to its web master.
I wonder if innovation stagnated because of the extensive (ab)use of the web. Granted, early on, Google's contributions have been more than just pioneering. Both on the backend and the frontend, we all owe them a pint.
But recently, it feels it's just been self-serving. And the monopolistic overtones plus the loss of "do no evil" has arguably hurt us in recent years.
That being said, if the web browser isn't funded so deeply, maybe this is a good thing? Maybe that will give birth to fresh cycles again. I kind of think like letting a corn field grow a new crop to let it regenerate. It could usher in new innovations.
- Waterluvian 1y agoI can see what you’re getting at but I think the monotonous, sterilized nature of the Web is really business driven, not technology driven.
- mickelsen 1y agoI'm not so sure about that, I bet we'd probably still have Flash, Java Applets, Silverlight and ActiveX controls. The web was a mess before. The recent capture by big platforms is more about taking you out of the web, into their superapps. edit: On a second thought, as a dev now, I look at React, Angular, all these mega frameworks... and wonder if we're just patching over problems big tech baked into the modern web. First point still stands tho.
- taftster 1y agoI mean, I don't disagree with you. I think we needed Google and needed their investment to push forward past Applets, ActiveX, and Flash. But now, we're stagnating again. So maybe drying up those funds will be part of the cure.
- mikelward 1y agoI think Apple also forced the world to move on from Flash. The iPhone didn't have Flash.
- taftster 1y agoAll the other plugins were dying on their own (for whatever reason). But Flash was a stubborn virus, to be sure. Yes, it definitely took the big slap from Apple to kill Flash once and for all.
- robin_reala 1y agoOh, that’s definitely revisionism. The iPhone killed Flash, and ActiveX (outside of South Korea / Silverlight) and applets were already dead at that point.
- mickelsen 1y agoYeah, true. I forgot that, even Steve's letter on why they wouldn't put flash on the iPhone. That was the final blow, yup. But the web was still a clunky mess of plugins, broken standards, and browser-specific hacks. Google pushed to make the web better. And through Chrome they helped bring WebKit to multiplatform: I still remember I couldn't even get rounded edges or nice typography support across platforms, only in Safari. It wasn’t until Chrome took off that the rest started paying attention.
- michaelt 1y agoThe iPhone was undoubtedly the deciding factor, I agree - but interestingly Netflix used to rely on Silverlight for DRM [1] until Google introduced video DRM to Chrome in ~2013 [2]. iPhone netflix users had to use an app. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-26-netflix-finally-brings-watch-instantly-to-macs-via-silverlight.html https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-26-netflix-finally-brings-w... [2] https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-at-netflix-721d1f143979 https://netflixtechblog.com/html5-video-at-netflix-721d1f143...
- asadotzler 1y agoWhy was ActiveX dead? Why didn't it succeed when MS launched it at a time IE had 90%+ user share?
- pixl97 1y agoBecause it required Windows in a time that iPhones were storming the market. Also the ActiveX security model was pretty horrific.
- fsloth 1y agoThe web browser is an ugly mongrel that in a “sane” world would never exist. The only reason it is a platform is due to the immense wealth funneled to ductaping and reinforcing it to hold. It’s basically a statue of liberty made of ductape and chewing gum, then reinforced with formula-1 level engineering and novel materials research. The building blocks and lessons learned could be used for something novel (nope not gonna happen it’s permanent now). WASM, json, Skia renderer, pretty awesome v8 virtual machine etc etc … all of that are pretty neat. I guess the key thing is what is the value of browser now? It’s the ui to bazillion networked business and government systems, productivity tools etc. I would argue the sticky moat here is not the web interface, though, but the data and the familiar usage patterns. _Theoretically_ the ux is portable to any system with vector graphics renderer and the data itself should be (a long stretch right) independent of the client ui.
- 6510 1y agoThe winning (marketingwise) systems couldn't get sandboxing to work. You couldn't simply download software and run it.
- watermelon0 1y agoSure, but back then people were used to downloading and running random exe files (even from really untrusted sources such as torrent sites, eMule, etc.)
- 6510 1y agoimho, there are no trusted sources nor should we need them. One can have a good track record for as long as it lasts.