4 ms·

Personally, I don't enjoy using web browsers much, either for "documents" or apps. There's a lot of good stuff out there made with hard work by talented people,

by mbrock 11y ago

Personally, I don't enjoy using web browsers much, either for "documents" or apps. There's a lot of good stuff out there made with hard work by talented people, but when it comes to my own personal computing, I would much rather use other kinds of interaction. 99% of my internet life consists of a few homogenous styles of interaction: browsing pseudo-hierarchical directories; communicating via text; purchasing; looking at pictures and movies; etc. In a hypothetical cyber-utopia or something, this could all just be a simple protocol (say, um, combining aspects of Direct Connect, BitTorrent, NNTP, Gopher, Bitcoin, GPG) that I could use with my own client, which would probably be an Emacs interface. Instead we live in a world where the web standards seem to encourage teams to spend their energy on reimplementing drop-down widgets. It's wasteful and doesn't even lead to particularly good user interfaces. How many sites or web apps work well (actually well, not just semi-tolerably) with keyboard navigation? How much bandwidth and CPU goes to waste? How many sites work passably offline? How easy is it to automate tasks as a user? How easy is it to learn how to make your own sites? I think "browsers" should be something very different from what they are today, and maybe something new will come along in the near future.

pjc50 11y ago
The browser is what it is because it's the camel designed by global committee. It's the place where competing interest groups fight one another to a standstill on a daily basis. Quite a lot of the stranger aspects aren't so much "features" as blast craters of past disasters. For example, consider the five technologies for interactive, animated things in the browser: Java applets, ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, and Javascript. Apart from Silverlight, which never really took off, they're all 20 years old. Only Javascript has survived the security wars; Java applets are dead, Flash gets a CVE bullet with its name on every few weeks, and ActiveX was killed long ago. The near-death of NNTP is a story of spam cancels and cost allocation. The browser covers all use cases and is available everywhere. That means it's necessarily horribly compromised compared to native solutions, but is an absolutely killer advantage for adoption. Incrementalism nearly always wins. Furthermore, the unwillingness of people to pay directly for software leaves us with a continual problem of exploitative software. Everything from flashlight apps that steal your contact list to ads that steal your battery to connection-sharing apps that open you to liability for the actions of others. For the moment, we keep other people's software securely nailed shut in the browser.
- oneweekwonder 11y ago
  Just want to add Unity WebPlayer[1] to the list of interactive technologies. It is not as popular or generic as the five you mentioned but I do see it pop up a lot if you want to do some casual web gaming, which I don't like, because it is just another plugin you need to use the "open" web. [1]: https://unity3d.com/webplayer https://unity3d.com/webplayer
  - empyrical 11y ago
    Unity's been working on bettering its HTML5/ASMjs exporting, so hopefully the need for a plugin goes away someday
- harkyns_castle 11y ago
  > Quite a lot of the stranger aspects aren't so much "features" as blast craters of past disasters. Cracked me up, very well said. In general I agree that the document-centric browser has been abused horribly. Then we get obscene beasts like node.js, because, well, the browser does it, so must we.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Node.js is interesting, and while it wouldn't be my first choice I can see how it came about. AJAX in the browser leading to Javascript developers evolving a callback-chaining style; realising that they could use the same language and style on the server; the inherent high efficiency of single-process nonblocking callback orientated servers.
    - georgerobinson 11y ago
      Does anyone think that JavaScript could overtake PHP as the "go-to" language for server-side scripting with Node.js as the "go-to" runtime? Despite my indifference to Node.js, I can see the unification of client-side and server-side scripting into a single language being incredibly valuable to the millions of PHP and JavaScript developers (both front and back-end) out there: most of whom beyond the realm of HackerNews and want to get it done. Not only that, it would significantly reduce the barrier to entry for web scripting and disincentivize beginners from picking up all those nasty habits such as md5 password hashing and manually constructing SQL queries from raw input which are so worryingly accessible. The only thing I can see preventing this are: 1. Lack of a mod_node for Apache. Perhaps this exists? 2. The upload and refresh workflow so many PHP developers are familiar with 3. A scheduler to prevent any one website from blocking the Node.js event loop on shared hosting Is this completely bonkers, or is it quite sane?
teknologist 11y ago
Or, in short, you want everything to run in an emacs interface. The world has moved on. We have mice now. Sorry. Google implemented keyboard navigation in their search results and apparently the uptake has not been great. CPUs are there to be "wasted". You pay for that clock frequency to use it and make your life better. Most people don't want to do everything in a terminal. It's depressing.
- rjaco31 11y ago
  Google hijacking the keyboard to only be able to navigate through their search results instead of letting the user scroll the page with keyboard as usual is indeed pretty annoying imho..
- mbrock 11y ago
  We had mice for a brief instant of computer history, then came the phones and tablets and e-readers and watches and TVs and voice interfaces and who knows what's next? I worked on a web-based replacement for medical record software, and a primary complaint from users was that they wanted to be able to use the keyboard. These weren't Unix nerds or whatever, they were normal people who wanted to get stuff done effectively and ergonomically. Nobody knows you can do keyboard navigation on Google, and anyhow that's just one website with a special custom JavaScript. Why keyboard navigation on the web is so horrible and embarrassing is an interesting question with lots of strands to investigate. Why would CPUs be there to be wasted? Power efficiency is even an ethical imperative these days. If there are more efficient ways to do the basic tasks of computing and networking, that also allows CPUs to do more interesting and valuable things. It's not about Emacs, that's just my personal idiosyncratic preference. Other people have other preferences, which is exactly the point. Note that Emacs works very well with many network standards, like email, Usenet, IRC, RSS, even BitTorrent. These are protocols that have enough semantic structure, openness, and simplicity to allow access with different clients that present the information in whatever way is optimal for the user. As for most people not wanting to use terminals, how do you know? Maybe they just don't like the existing terminal interfaces. Unix commands are notoriously cryptic and shells don't help much. But if you showed a normal person a nice-looking shell where you could type "netflix breaking bad s3" and get a nice presentation back, would they really be depressed?
kylebrown 11y ago
> In a hypothetical cyber-utopia or something, this could all just be a simple protocol (say, um, combining aspects of Direct Connect, BitTorrent, NNTP, Gopher, Bitcoin, GPG) The article does mention p2p and decentralization, but the browser isn't whats holding that back. The client-server development paradigm is. Currently, every dev making a p2p app has to roll their own platform because there's no standard (i.e. no LAMP, rails, or Heroku for deploying p2p apps). Some projects are working to change this, namely BitTorrent Maelstrom (which is a fork of Chromium with native support for magnet URLs, so it auto-renders an html/js package distributed via torrent); and http://ipfs.io http://ipfs.io (a sort of content-addressable p2p filesystem, or bittorrent on steroids).
- mbrock 11y ago
  Yeah, that's super interesting stuff... Also Etherium, which as I understand it is a way to do distributed algorithms in a very general way.
nso95 11y ago
That's the entire point of semantic web

by mbrock 11y ago

pjc50 11y ago

The browser is what it is because it's the camel designed by global committee. It's the place where competing interest groups fight one another to a standstill on a daily basis. Quite a lot of the stranger aspects aren't so much "features" as blast craters of past disasters. For example, consider the five technologies for interactive, animated things in the browser: Java applets, ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, and Javascript. Apart from Silverlight, which never really took off, they're all 20 years old. Only Javascript has survived the security wars; Java applets are dead, Flash gets a CVE bullet with its name on every few weeks, and ActiveX was killed long ago. The near-death of NNTP is a story of spam cancels and cost allocation. The browser covers all use cases and is available everywhere. That means it's necessarily horribly compromised compared to native solutions, but is an absolutely killer advantage for adoption. Incrementalism nearly always wins. Furthermore, the unwillingness of people to pay directly for software leaves us with a continual problem of exploitative software. Everything from flashlight apps that steal your contact list to ads that steal your battery to connection-sharing apps that open you to liability for the actions of others. For the moment, we keep other people's software securely nailed shut in the browser.

oneweekwonder 11y ago
Just want to add Unity WebPlayer[1] to the list of interactive technologies. It is not as popular or generic as the five you mentioned but I do see it pop up a lot if you want to do some casual web gaming, which I don't like, because it is just another plugin you need to use the "open" web. [1]: https://unity3d.com/webplayer https://unity3d.com/webplayer
- empyrical 11y ago
  Unity's been working on bettering its HTML5/ASMjs exporting, so hopefully the need for a plugin goes away someday
harkyns_castle 11y ago
> Quite a lot of the stranger aspects aren't so much "features" as blast craters of past disasters. Cracked me up, very well said. In general I agree that the document-centric browser has been abused horribly. Then we get obscene beasts like node.js, because, well, the browser does it, so must we.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Node.js is interesting, and while it wouldn't be my first choice I can see how it came about. AJAX in the browser leading to Javascript developers evolving a callback-chaining style; realising that they could use the same language and style on the server; the inherent high efficiency of single-process nonblocking callback orientated servers.
  - georgerobinson 11y ago
    Does anyone think that JavaScript could overtake PHP as the "go-to" language for server-side scripting with Node.js as the "go-to" runtime? Despite my indifference to Node.js, I can see the unification of client-side and server-side scripting into a single language being incredibly valuable to the millions of PHP and JavaScript developers (both front and back-end) out there: most of whom beyond the realm of HackerNews and want to get it done. Not only that, it would significantly reduce the barrier to entry for web scripting and disincentivize beginners from picking up all those nasty habits such as md5 password hashing and manually constructing SQL queries from raw input which are so worryingly accessible. The only thing I can see preventing this are: 1. Lack of a mod_node for Apache. Perhaps this exists? 2. The upload and refresh workflow so many PHP developers are familiar with 3. A scheduler to prevent any one website from blocking the Node.js event loop on shared hosting Is this completely bonkers, or is it quite sane?

teknologist 11y ago

Or, in short, you want everything to run in an emacs interface. The world has moved on. We have mice now. Sorry. Google implemented keyboard navigation in their search results and apparently the uptake has not been great. CPUs are there to be "wasted". You pay for that clock frequency to use it and make your life better. Most people don't want to do everything in a terminal. It's depressing.

rjaco31 11y ago
Google hijacking the keyboard to only be able to navigate through their search results instead of letting the user scroll the page with keyboard as usual is indeed pretty annoying imho..
mbrock 11y ago
We had mice for a brief instant of computer history, then came the phones and tablets and e-readers and watches and TVs and voice interfaces and who knows what's next? I worked on a web-based replacement for medical record software, and a primary complaint from users was that they wanted to be able to use the keyboard. These weren't Unix nerds or whatever, they were normal people who wanted to get stuff done effectively and ergonomically. Nobody knows you can do keyboard navigation on Google, and anyhow that's just one website with a special custom JavaScript. Why keyboard navigation on the web is so horrible and embarrassing is an interesting question with lots of strands to investigate. Why would CPUs be there to be wasted? Power efficiency is even an ethical imperative these days. If there are more efficient ways to do the basic tasks of computing and networking, that also allows CPUs to do more interesting and valuable things. It's not about Emacs, that's just my personal idiosyncratic preference. Other people have other preferences, which is exactly the point. Note that Emacs works very well with many network standards, like email, Usenet, IRC, RSS, even BitTorrent. These are protocols that have enough semantic structure, openness, and simplicity to allow access with different clients that present the information in whatever way is optimal for the user. As for most people not wanting to use terminals, how do you know? Maybe they just don't like the existing terminal interfaces. Unix commands are notoriously cryptic and shells don't help much. But if you showed a normal person a nice-looking shell where you could type "netflix breaking bad s3" and get a nice presentation back, would they really be depressed?

kylebrown 11y ago

> In a hypothetical cyber-utopia or something, this could all just be a simple protocol (say, um, combining aspects of Direct Connect, BitTorrent, NNTP, Gopher, Bitcoin, GPG) The article does mention p2p and decentralization, but the browser isn't whats holding that back. The client-server development paradigm is. Currently, every dev making a p2p app has to roll their own platform because there's no standard (i.e. no LAMP, rails, or Heroku for deploying p2p apps). Some projects are working to change this, namely BitTorrent Maelstrom (which is a fork of Chromium with native support for magnet URLs, so it auto-renders an html/js package distributed via torrent); and http://ipfs.io http://ipfs.io (a sort of content-addressable p2p filesystem, or bittorrent on steroids).

mbrock 11y ago
Yeah, that's super interesting stuff... Also Etherium, which as I understand it is a way to do distributed algorithms in a very general way.

nso95 11y ago

That's the entire point of semantic web