3 ms·

Ask HN: Are you satisfied with the state of the Web? What should be different?

7 points by rblion 12y ago

alxmdev 12y ago
Most websites still don't behave well if I increase my browser's minimum font size to something I'm comfortable with, like 16 or 18pt. Entire or partial blocks of content will disappear, links will become unclickable, paragraphs will overlap. For all the efforts in the past decade for increasing accessibility, this very simple scenario is somehow still beyond reach.
Terr_ 12y ago
All the bad Javascript out there, either in degrees of malfunction or shades of malice. (Or both together.) The first causes unresponsive sites or breaking navigation. The second usually involves attempts to breach the user's privacy, unreasonable advertisements, or plain old malware.
underwater 12y ago
The web is great in theory but is somewhat broken in practice. What I'd like to see: * The web as a first class citizen on mobile. Apple have a lot to answer for here. For example Safari went years without having a position: fixed implementation and with an artificial 300ms delay on every tap event. That's crazy. They're either malicious or don't care. Neither is good for the web. * Faster progress shipping new technology. We've had smartphones for a decade and we're only now seeing proposals for offline access and notifications. * Access to lower level APIs. Browser vendors don't trust developers and as a result give us APIs that are crippled and late. See the sad state of workers and lack of text measurement APIs, or access to layout, or image decoding, or the cache. Google are doing some good work here but then they go and release inflexible techonolgy like their transition API, service workers or web components that work brilliantly if you write web apps in the exact way they envision but are useless otherwise. Real innovation is happening in third party libraries and frameworks. Browser vendors need to acknowledge that and support those projects instead of trying to replicate them natively. * Publishers should stop shoveling crap on their sites. App upsell interstitials and overlay ads create a terrible experience that makes the web feel like shit. They wouldn't do that in their own native apps but standards are lower in the web. * Developers need to stop kidding themselves about the web being as powerful as native. We try and tell ourselves the experience is just as good and point to toy apps and painfully optimized tech demos. It's not as good. And it's not going to get better until we raise our expectations about what our tools should be able to do.
grizzles 12y ago
No. Steam and the (Apple, Google, etc) App Stores exist for a reason - Mozilla's colossal failure. I can't count the number of times I have been out somewhere with my top of the line android phone, loaded a responsive HTML5 webpage and then finally gave up after spending way too much time trying to get to the data that I was after. The mobile app experience is terrible. Static compiled code will always run way faster than dynamic languages. Mozilla's ideology doesn't allow compiled code, even though that's basically what asm.js is all about. The smartest and best thing Mozilla or some new browser vendor could do would be if they embraced android . The amount of quality engineering that has went into building that modern, ultra lean framework is epic. Imagine if someone made it so that anyone could do the equivalent of <html><object apk="my.apk" /></html>. That would be pretty great. Ofc for all sorts of cultural reasons it probably won't happen. Imagine Microsoft open sourced windows xp in the 90s, and no one bothered to do anything with it. That would be the equivalent of today's situation. PS Google can obviously do it - but maybe they are leaving it shut off because according to their current calculations the App Store revenue is better than having dominant browser market share. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush... A thread with some great commentary on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5226309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5226309
- rubiquity 12y ago
  Why is it specifically Mozilla's fault?
MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Because the number of web pages is growing far out of proportion to the number of people who surf the web, advertising is getting less and less effective. Rather than finding some other way to make money, or some other, more effective way to advertise, more ads are displayed, they are animated, play videos and sound &c. It is for that reason that I set firefox to partially disable flash. I can watch a video if I click a certain link, but most videos are disabled. I did that not because I don't like the video but because their sound is obtrusive. Particularly vexing to me is that I often visit what appears at first to be an interesting article, but very first thing I'm presented with a "Like Us On Facebook" popup. How do I know whether I like you, when I haven't had the opportunity to read your article yet? The money from the web is concentrated into a very few hands - Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft. They're not going to give it up willingly. We need to find a way for the sole proprietor to earn a living online.
vdaniuk 12y ago
I am absolutely dissatisfied with the inability of social good companies and non-profits to build ethical, sustainable monetization strategies. Ads are not the main problem, though, it's incompetence, outright lies, pseudoscience and politicking content found on most popular websites.
phantom_oracle 12y ago
The monopolies and backdoor dealings of data. What more can I say that Snowden hasn't already told us. At least governments can be tamed (some of them), but those corporate behemoths will hold on to everything about us well after we're dead.

7 points by rblion 12y ago

Most websites still don't behave well if I increase my browser's minimum font size to something I'm comfortable with, like 16 or 18pt. Entire or partial blocks of content will disappear, links will become unclickable, paragraphs will overlap. For all the efforts in the past decade for increasing accessibility, this very simple scenario is somehow still beyond reach.

Terr_ 12y ago

All the bad Javascript out there, either in degrees of malfunction or shades of malice. (Or both together.) The first causes unresponsive sites or breaking navigation. The second usually involves attempts to breach the user's privacy, unreasonable advertisements, or plain old malware.

underwater 12y ago

The web is great in theory but is somewhat broken in practice. What I'd like to see: * The web as a first class citizen on mobile. Apple have a lot to answer for here. For example Safari went years without having a position: fixed implementation and with an artificial 300ms delay on every tap event. That's crazy. They're either malicious or don't care. Neither is good for the web. * Faster progress shipping new technology. We've had smartphones for a decade and we're only now seeing proposals for offline access and notifications. * Access to lower level APIs. Browser vendors don't trust developers and as a result give us APIs that are crippled and late. See the sad state of workers and lack of text measurement APIs, or access to layout, or image decoding, or the cache. Google are doing some good work here but then they go and release inflexible techonolgy like their transition API, service workers or web components that work brilliantly if you write web apps in the exact way they envision but are useless otherwise. Real innovation is happening in third party libraries and frameworks. Browser vendors need to acknowledge that and support those projects instead of trying to replicate them natively. * Publishers should stop shoveling crap on their sites. App upsell interstitials and overlay ads create a terrible experience that makes the web feel like shit. They wouldn't do that in their own native apps but standards are lower in the web. * Developers need to stop kidding themselves about the web being as powerful as native. We try and tell ourselves the experience is just as good and point to toy apps and painfully optimized tech demos. It's not as good. And it's not going to get better until we raise our expectations about what our tools should be able to do.

grizzles 12y ago

No. Steam and the (Apple, Google, etc) App Stores exist for a reason - Mozilla's colossal failure. I can't count the number of times I have been out somewhere with my top of the line android phone, loaded a responsive HTML5 webpage and then finally gave up after spending way too much time trying to get to the data that I was after. The mobile app experience is terrible. Static compiled code will always run way faster than dynamic languages. Mozilla's ideology doesn't allow compiled code, even though that's basically what asm.js is all about. The smartest and best thing Mozilla or some new browser vendor could do would be if they embraced android . The amount of quality engineering that has went into building that modern, ultra lean framework is epic. Imagine if someone made it so that anyone could do the equivalent of <html><object apk="my.apk" /></html>. That would be pretty great. Ofc for all sorts of cultural reasons it probably won't happen. Imagine Microsoft open sourced windows xp in the 90s, and no one bothered to do anything with it. That would be the equivalent of today's situation. PS Google can obviously do it - but maybe they are leaving it shut off because according to their current calculations the App Store revenue is better than having dominant browser market share. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush... A thread with some great commentary on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5226309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5226309

rubiquity 12y ago
Why is it specifically Mozilla's fault?

MichaelCrawford 12y ago

Because the number of web pages is growing far out of proportion to the number of people who surf the web, advertising is getting less and less effective. Rather than finding some other way to make money, or some other, more effective way to advertise, more ads are displayed, they are animated, play videos and sound &c. It is for that reason that I set firefox to partially disable flash. I can watch a video if I click a certain link, but most videos are disabled. I did that not because I don't like the video but because their sound is obtrusive. Particularly vexing to me is that I often visit what appears at first to be an interesting article, but very first thing I'm presented with a "Like Us On Facebook" popup. How do I know whether I like you, when I haven't had the opportunity to read your article yet? The money from the web is concentrated into a very few hands - Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft. They're not going to give it up willingly. We need to find a way for the sole proprietor to earn a living online.

vdaniuk 12y ago

I am absolutely dissatisfied with the inability of social good companies and non-profits to build ethical, sustainable monetization strategies. Ads are not the main problem, though, it's incompetence, outright lies, pseudoscience and politicking content found on most popular websites.

phantom_oracle 12y ago

The monopolies and backdoor dealings of data. What more can I say that Snowden hasn't already told us. At least governments can be tamed (some of them), but those corporate behemoths will hold on to everything about us well after we're dead.