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The 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
by fsloth 1y ago
The 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.