We had Java Web Start decades ago, but we decided to design web apps as stupidly as possible instead.
Comment on All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding | by Dan Fabulich | Apr, 2025
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 days agoIt never ends. The browser as we knew it in the early 2000s has become an all-encompassing engine to run all sorts of - well, apps. Can’t really call all of it just websites anymore. Media theaters. Secure banking and shopping. Health provider portals. etc etc etc
It never ends.
And the code base has become so vast, so complex, that you can never be 100% sure that it’s “finished”. Figuratively, there’s always someone who dropped a cigarette in the wet cement some time back. That cement will be ever so slightly weaker than the cement surrounding it and might - or might not - break.
I’m not saying I like this, but it is what it is. The Internet of 2025 has very little in common with the internet of [however far you want to go back].
grue@lemmy.world 2 days ago
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 2 days ago
Can you ELI not a js coder?
grue@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well first of all, Javascript is a shitty, poorly-designed language hacked together in a week by an asshole who went on to be famous for other such ‘great’ things as getting fired from Mozilla for homophobia and founding a crypto scam wrapped in a protection racket (Brave browser).
But that’s not even the whole of it. The entire concept of using scripting to turn a web page into an application is fundamentally flawed from the start, because HTML is a Language designed to Mark up HyperText documents and was never intended to give the
developerweb designer fine-grained control over the rendering at all, let alone consistently across browsers. It was designed for the user to be able to customize the fonts and colors and margins and whatnot so that he could read the document better! So then eventually somebody finally comes up with the bright idea to quit trying to render everything to HTML and just give programmers a fucking rectangle in a VM they can use arbitrary programming languages to draw on instead, and that’s how WebAssembly became a thing.On top of that, even when you do manage to hack together some semblance of a functioning UI library (much like a serial killer crafting a suit made from the skin of his victim), after wasting orders of magnitude extra effort compared with just using an appropriate technology to begin with and while fundamentally breaking the entire design intent of the World Wide Web in the process, you still end up with your shitty UI running inside the page viewport of a web browser with its own UI surrounding it, for no fucking reason. And worse, the elements of that browser UI range from useless to misleading to things that break your app if the user clicks them (e.g. the back button), forcing you to do even more work to break the browser UI so it stops functioning as intended first. So then eventually somebody finally comes up with the bright idea to spend even yet more effort to strip the browser UI out of the browser, and that’s how Electron apps became a thing. But even then, the app still doesn’t match the system’s native UI and has to re-implement shit like dialog boxes because there’s multiple layers of cruft between it and the OS’s actual GUI API.
So anyway, the gist is that “web developers” have spent the last several decades piling shit upon shit upon shit hacking around a design that was fundamentally not fit for purpose (or rather, that I would argue was very fit for purpose but that purpose was not making goddamn applications!), only to finally start to approach some pale imitation of a decent thing now, by ripping out most of what they did before.
Meanwhile, all the way back in 2001, they could’ve just fucking written a Java app, with a Swing UI that had only one layer between it and the OS native GUI API and which would open in its own proper application window (that would have its own icon and minimize to the taskbar properly and act in pretty much all the other ways a first-class native application is supposed to act) and let the user launch it by clicking a hyperlink on a web page, just like a “modern” HTML+JS web app does. In 2001! This whole goddamn shitshow could’ve been avoided, with technology that already existed two and a half decades ago!
So why didn’t that happen instead? Two reasons: one, there was kind of a backlash against Java because of how overhyped it had been and also because it’s a little annoying to program in because of all the verbose boilerplate, and two – and I think more importantly – the entire Java app had to download before it could start running; there was no equivalent to AJAX to allow parts of the application and data to load on the fly. For that, it was deemed slow and unusable and got completely left by the wayside. But that was a huge mistake, because fixing that would’ve been a Hell of a lot less effort than building the entire Javascript ecosystem!
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Yes. In 2001. Not just proper design of all the system and all the solutions in it was possible, it was there in flesh, and it was on the market, and it was visible, and the world went the other route.
Literally all of it, engineers sometimes can design logically complete systems, and great engineers sometimes do that with amazingly enormous systems, and one of such people took part in inception of BSD Unix, Internet, RISC and Java, all of them. How the Web should function has already been thought through.
TBH in my childhood I complained about Java applications being slow though.
But with a typical modern website that complaint seems dishonest in retrospective.
OK, I guess I’m just blabbering because of boredom.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 1 day ago
I dunno, could be just me, but you sound a bit upset
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 1 day ago
Thanks, that was a fun read.
Preaching to the choir wrt js and how it’s just piling on and on. But then I did say I’m 5.
So WebAssembly could have been a development of Java apps on the web? I vaguely remember that used to be a thing long ago. And Java Web Start is just that? Or is it “to finally start to approach some pale imitation of a decent thing now”?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
A cross-platform environment for applications where fetching them is conveniently automated is not a bad thing.
Using something not intended for that goal is a bad thing. And making it the same thing as the Web.
I’m also confident that Sun went under because of overestimating the pace of industry development, but not its logical direction. When Java was only in the making, it was intended for this exact purpose. Cross-platform, easy development, transparent internals, all that. Designed for it to be possible to make a JVM for almost anything.
It’s so unfair really, they should have won before failing. They are going to win with nobody understanding they won.