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Software developer Drew DeVault has written a post at his blog about the reckless, infinite scope of today's web browsers. His conclusion is that, given decades of feature creep, it is now impossible to build a new web browser due to the obscene complexity of the web.
I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.
It is impossible to:
- Implement the web correctly
- Implement the web securely
- Implement the web at all
Starting a bespoke browser engine with the intention of competing with Google or Mozilla is a fool's errand. The last serious attempt to make a new browser, Servo, has become one part incubator for Firefox refactoring, one part playground for bored Mozilla engineers to mess with technology no one wants, and zero parts viable modern web browser. But WebVR is cool, right? Right?
The consequences of this are obvious. Browsers are the most expensive piece of software a typical consumer computer runs. They're infamous for using all of your RAM, pinning CPU and I/O, draining your battery, etc. Web browsers are responsible for more than 8,000 CVEs.3
The browser duopoly of Firefox and Chrome/Chromium has clearly harmed the World-Wide Web. However, a closer look at the membership of the W3C committes also reveals representation by classic villains which, perhaps coincidentally, showed up around the time the problems noted by Drew began to grow.
Previously:
An Open Letter to Web Developers (2020)
Google Now Bans Some Linux Web Browsers from their Services (2019)
HTML is the Web (2019)
The Future of Browsers (2019)
One Year Since the W3C Sold Out the Web with EME (2018)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @04:38PM (3 children)
It's getting to be impossible to make a site. In the old days you would read the Apache docs, start Apache, pick either Postgres or MySQL for your backend and stick with it, and pick either Perl or PHP for your frontend and stick with it, and it would take a few months of study assuming that you already knew how to program and how to create static pages in HTML. Now in addition to all of that, to use any off-the-shelf product you also need a docker and a container and a CMS and a framework and a specific brand of each of them and you need to know what the hell each of these are and they all require external libraries, and THERE IS NO DOCUMENTATION for any of them. You have to know somebody who knows how to use all of these things and there is no help for the teenager who just wants to throw up a fucking bulletin board or image catalog which is how most of us started out. Or you could spend a few years reinventing the wheel by doing things the old way but you would always be behind the curve of the corporate-sponsored projects.
And if you do get a site up and running, your web host bans you for some unstated violation of the terms of service with no evidence that you ever did anything wrong and no chance to apologise or fix the problem, and you also get banned from Paypal, Twitter, and Facebook at the same time so you lose any social media reach that you had and any chance to turn your website into a business. It's getting ridiculous.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @05:16PM (2 children)
PHP and Perl in the old days?
We're talking about different old days now. In my "old days", you bought a book or downloaded a course of HTML. In every country you will find a different course the most popular because they were in native language. Most people who had Internet provider accounts had few MBs (usually 4..8, sometimes 10) for a magic "public_html" directory. No programming needed except pure HTML.
Now I have a static hobby site. I manage it with some 15-year-old WYSIWYG editor which has awful HTML output, so Perl script starting on the closing of wine (yes, edited on Linux with Windows program) cleans it up. The resulting HTML code is still smaller, faster and more compatible than most CMS output (at least with no PHP errors in CSS files, cheers WordPress).
Now if someone at work pisses me off and pushes me to make an "web application" but in the agreement requires only a "computer program" (I do FE simulations and optimization so programs are "read input file -> calculate -> write output file to view in postprocessor") I write it in Perl taking care to have at least two regular expressions per code block :D.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Tuesday March 24 2020, @09:24PM (1 child)
Since then, things have changed. Comcast discontinued included personal web hosting nearly five years ago. (Source [dbstalk.com]) As for what replaces it, despite the IndieWeb project's steps for getting started [indieweb.org], I don't see people migrating to buying a domain name and leasing hosting service from a VPS provider en masse. Should, and how should, this be changed?
What would you do with an agreement that can be satisfied either A. through a web application that runs on all major browsers, or B. through five native applications, one for each of Windows, macOS, X11/Linux, Android, and iOS/iPadOS?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @02:05AM
This is a purely attention DDoS, and not much can be done. Except educating community but if the only bond keeping the community is common consumption of ads, like in "social media" it just won't work.