I know this sounds bad, but maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Necessary is the mother of invention and maybe browser technology should be funded by governments instead of privately owned advertising megacorps?
I know this sounds bad, but maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Necessary is the mother of invention and maybe browser technology should be funded by governments instead of privately owned advertising megacorps?
this is my most controversial take in computing in general:
i’ve always hated the browser. the reason there are only a few working browser engines is that HTTP and the HTML/CSS/JS tech stack is a gigantic pile of tech debt, and even using Chromium and Firefox you run into edge cases where, for certain edge cases, they don’t always follow the specs as defined in these ancient RFCs. and these specs: why tf are they treated as gospel? which software product specs drafted 50 years ago get this kind of reverence? why is it that other GUIs have had tons of iteration, not just of their spec but their full stack implementation (Wayland, .NET, Kotlin Compose, SwiftUI, etc), but we’re all just fine with this mess of janky boomer protocols cuz it lets startups get to market faster? why is downloading an entire app (less some caching) every time you want to use it feel less cumbersome than installing something native to the runtime environment where the protocols can be tightly controlled by the developer and not subject to whatever security and storage protocols whatever browser implementation decides is good for you? cookies? really? the browser should be reimagined with a tighter set of protocols that allow you to look at brochure sites and download content, ie apps. even the best web apps are a janky mess and have never worked better than properly developed desktop GUI. /rant
I think browsers are unique because it’s how laypeople interact with their computer the most.
Well, I do think you’re wrong about quite a lot of that. So yeah that is in fact controversial. Upvoted.
i know i’m in the minority here so i’m not going to bury myself in this hole, but i do think those are addressable problems. many of them have been addressed. replacing Javascript is exactly what i’m talking about.
Isn’t that what wasm kinda is?
not really. using WASM as your full stack for your front end is just adding to the complexity and jank. WASM is there for compute heavy stuff. you can use it that way if you want.