Submitted 11 months ago by 1984@lemmy.today to technology@lemmy.world
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 may be a layman with regards to this, can someone explain to me the thinking behind the DoJ’s proposal and why they think it’s for the common good.
Monopolies are bad enough by themselves. But with google they own such a large part of the day to day web browsing experience it’s amazing it’s not worse than it already is.
Eh, 80% of what this Dan fellow provides can’t be all that much…
I don’t want web browsers to be changing all the time forcing me to do updates. Software that is complete doesn’t need to be changed just for the sake of change.
That’s not how security development works. New things come up and need to be updated to protect you.
The vast majority of it is not “security development”. There are just screwing around with perfectly good software, sometimes making it worse, because they have a large staff of developers they are paying a salary to.
HA!
So I spent two days hacking together a Gemini client script in tcl/tk. It’s near 700 lines already, some of those are dead weight (client certs, stuck cause pki module in tcllib doesn’t know of hashing algorithms newer than sha256), but it’s usable for reading pages, viewing images, saving either and answering prompts, with basic history. A fully functional client is supposed to be doable in 1-2 days in like 200 lines of code in something. So it’s a clumsy mess.
And yes, it feels like it’s a lot of what we need web for. Suppose I got client certs working and this were a Gemini service. I’d follow a link saying “post something”, I’d type this comment into a prompt and send the request, and on the next update it would be here, right under CN from my client cert used as nickname. One could have such links under every comment. One could build threads.
So maybe yes.
This is great in my opinion. Web browsers are infernally complicated and need to be simplified. CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess. I would love to see large swathes of both of them eliminated from existence, and maybe the maintenance burden leaves a very small chance that we could start to see some of these technologies starting to get dropped. I personally would love to see web components disappear most of all.
Regardless, Google really fucked over the web when they decided to add all these unnecessary technologies to Chrome. No doubt a EEE strategy to take over all browser development on the web. Something should have been done much earlier about it, but now we’ll have to see how this mess gets sorted out.
While true, some things we want to simplify are sometimes as simple as they can be.
But saying that, I’m thinking of Java, not of the Web. Java is really a wonderful creation.
Just - sometimes when learning new things I understand that yes, I was right and some thing is too complex and it’s just that, but sometimes that it’s optimal and the “simple” way is even more complex.
IMHO the Web solves two goals, which should be separated. Global hypertext services and serving applications executed on client in a sandbox. The latter is far more complex and demanding for security and efficiency and features, but the former is far more important socially.
Maybe the former should rely upon a simpler and easier technology, like Gemini, and the latter be a kind of applications like an address book or a 2FA application. Where you see a list of imported connections, press “run”, and then over a standard protocol fetch the actual executable application to run in a sandbox. What the Web in practice already is for most people, untied from a global hypertext system. So that we’d have both.
I mean, it’s pretty normal to open magnet links in a different application, or download an RDP connection file and open it in an RDP client.
OK, my brain is asleep.
It’s about 100 billion times either to create GUI using Godot than HTML + Javascript + CSS.
Try Tk. It’ll be faster or as fast as that, I guarantee that.
Lol
Yeah it is because you don’t have to worry about responsive, cross browser compatibility, limiting asset use, accessibility, SEO…
CSS is a bloated mess. Javascript is a bloated mess.
Why would less money make people do more work to fix this?
Their point is to make them dissapear, not fix.
This is so wild. I really don’t miss Flash, but since Steve killed it with the iPhone, Web development has spent more than 10 years to reinvent the ActionScript3 environment and make the entire web depend on it. And who solely prevented AS3 as a web standard from happening? Chris Wilson, Web Standards Tech Lead at Google, in his former role at browser monopolist Microsoft.
Today, every single piece of the web is designed by Google to further their business. And all these fucking Electron applications…
I really don’t miss Flash,
Standardized “Flash”, well-sandboxed and separated from the browsers itself as it was, would be a good idea though.
to reinvent the ActionScript3 environment and make the entire web depend on it.
Unfortunately the separation part they “solved”.
I wasn’t aware of that, but it’s crazy. Thanks for sharing it. The sad truth is that there are probably lots of other standards that didn’t make it into browsers either because Google refused to adopt them in Chrome (JPEG2000 for example, but that’s a complicated ). Google had way too much influence over web standards because they had total control of the web browser.
Nobody can make a successful browser that is simpler. The moment a user hits a website that no longer works, they are going back to their old browser.
All these new features exist because websites replaced every single program most people used. Web browser now have to be capable of doing anything pretty well. It’s not some grand conspiracy to take over the internet, it’s providing the features devs want so they can deliver the things they want in the modern multiplatform no-install world.
All these new features exist because websites replaced every single program most people used. Web browser now have to be capable of doing anything pretty well.
Which means that simple cross-platform scripting languages with graphical abilities should have been more popularized.
I discovered tcl/tk for myself recently and it’s just wonderful. A 12 years old me would be capable to learn it, if I knew about it.
What the web browser does well is a sandbox to protect you from all the tits and dicks and “pay us 42 bitcoins” messages. People are afraid of running programs from random sources, but not of visiting random webpages.
So the products they need are a simplified web browser and a sandboxed environment for running things downloaded from it. What we have. Just separated, cause the former is too important to be affected by customer requirements of the latter.
Just compile everything to webassembly and ship that,using your preferred language and libraries.
Which means that we will get blobs to interact with, instead of JavaScript code that can be “reviewed” or monkey patched away.
Fun times. Thanks, monopolistic assholes like Goggle, Microsoft and Apple.
Also, I’m not going to argue that things aren’t better for developers today than they were before. Sure, web development is much easier these days. But at the same time, I think web applications are way too overengineered. There are lots of things that could be done in simpler ways - for example, why is it necessary to restyle scrollbars, or reimplement standard components like drop-down menus with reimplementations written entirely in Javascript? Things like this are just stupid and having to drop support for trivial things like this in the name of making browsers simpler is well worth it in my opinion.
Of course developers wanted this. They wanted to push all the complexity into the browser so they didn’t have to worry about it themselves. Google was happy to provide this because it meant that they could be the only ones that could write a browser. That was the “conspiracy” you’re talking about - but it wasn’t a conspiracy, it was more of a strategy on behalf of Google, who knew that they were the only ones that could provide this level of support, and so if they did it, nobody else would be able to compete with them. Even Microsoft gave up on their own engine.
But the only reason Google could do this is because they were deriving revenue from their advertising monopoly. If their web browser was honestly funded, many, many of the features that we see in Chrome today would have never existed.
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.
Have a look at Gemini and the Gemini capsules. Seems more like what a browser should be, in my opinion.
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.
there may be a little angst from reading and rereading the “Max-Age” portion of the cookie RFC that caused this trauma
maybe browser technology should be funded by government
Never directly!
maybe browser technology should be funded by governments
Yeah let’s make it even easier for them to implement backdoora
If it’s free software (which it should be), then we’d be able to see any backdoors they add.
Oh sweet summer child.
I mean, before DOGE ostensibly took over USDS I was aware of it funding open source projects through normal processes just because their continued improvement helped the government function. Making software good for government agencies was one of their mandates.
If I had full faith in the current Mozilla project like I used to, I’d say they could just accept funding through the nonprofit in a similar setup and just do good things.
My point is there are ways to make it work where there is funding without influence. Just corruption and capitalism are fighting against it.
Title made me think… Aren’t we end of the Browser development cycle yet? What improvement browsers can benefit from now on? What else on the roadmap?
If you want to see the future of browsers, just look at vivaldi. Other browsers always get its features 3 or 4 years down the road
Quit it with the Vivaldi ads, it’s closed source and based on chrome. Go away, stop shilling.
Are we at the end of the operating system development cycle? A browser is an operating system that abstracts away your operating system, at this point.
Anyway, there’s a lot of ad tech and tracking stuff to be implemented. You’ll love it, Google decided so.
Probably the most important thing is keeping up with security fixes. I’m not an expert in web security, but my impression is that there’s a never-ending cat and mouse game between hackers and browser developers to find or patch exploits. And since browsers play such an important role in the activity of hundreds of millions… billions?.. of consumers, it has the largest possible attack surface for hackers to target.
Then there’s things like better support for web assembly (how I would love the web dev world to break the JavaScript hegemony), and the constantly shifting web standards that are meant to make websites more capable, easier to program, and more performant. E.g. things like websockets and WebRTC.
Sure, security is the most important thing there. But I would say that’s a maintenance task and not really a development one.
Other protocols/tech you’ve mentioned already 7 to 10 years old. I don’t think they will get more love than they already did.
It 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].
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.
We had Java Web Start decades ago, but we decided to design web apps as stupidly as possible instead.
If only this could lead to scaling down the scope of web technologies so it’s sustainable to develop a browser without that 80% funding.
Wouldn’t be the first time we dropped an ultra complex technology for something much more simple, e.g. DCOM/CORBA for JSON-based RPC.
There are four of them?
Firefox, safari, chrome, edge. Depending on your perspective that’s either 3 or 4.
Nice. Maybe Mozilla will learn to walk by themselves (spoiler: they won’t).
That would require us, the users, to donate more.
No it wouldn’t.
Stop being a useful idiot.
Or them to charge for it, or take more money from, say, Alphabet, for services rendered.
Any of those options will get its users on the barricades. FF will always be in the hot chair.
In the end you’re right, donations are the best way.
We happily would if we knew it was going to devs
I don’t consider that as “walking by themselves”. Plus, maybe you aren’t aware that FF is managed by Mozilla Corp (not the foundation), which can’t legally take donations. Thus. The money you donate doesn’t find FF development. Last, I’m not an user and I’m not going to donate. I couldn’t care less. Mozilla did this to themselves. They can disappear tomorrow, as far as I am concerned.
Sounds wonderful
This is another bullet point on the list of MAGA stopping or confusing the flow and accessibility of information.
We are to know nothing about what they are doing in the world, ideally.
No. This is a thinly veiled pr price supporting Google as a monopoly
governments
Be careful what you ask for :(.
South Korea mandated internet explorer for all purchase checkout until relatively recently maybe the last 5 years. They had all these pieces but around it so checking out at a website you would have to prove your identity using national ID and then only IE would work.
Be very careful what you ask for.
That sounds like Microsoft bribed the shit out of SK 20 years ago.
But, yeah… Elect monkeys, get circus.
Also: be careful who you vote into office.
Oh no, where will Apple find the money to continue development!
Yeah but what about the other one?
The only one with a different web browser engine? The only one that is actural competition/
NecessaryNecessity is the mother of invention
Thank you, my spell checker was “helping”…
This doesn’t sound bad at all. This sounds like someone other than Google will be able to have a meaningful affect on web development.
unless, say, OpenAI, or Perplexity, or Microsoft buy it, and then cut Mozilla funding.
As long as Google doesn’t sell Chrome to OpenAI.
mtchristo@lemm.ee 11 months ago
One browser tab holding a few YouTube visits consumes about 350 MO of memory. I think we have added enough functionality to the browser