Bad month for the main thread
daverupert.com
daverupert.com
I don't think you can claim that the way we use the internet in 2018 is the same as how it was in 2001, we assume "web apps" for things like mail, editing documents and other things will work.
Now, I absolutely detest the insane complexity of a browser and that I can't have a 'lite' browsing experience today without sacrificing access to a large portion of the internet. (which I blame on the prevalence of javascript)
But do enjoy the 'no download', 'run anywhere' nature of web-applications, and, often, I'm willing to trade a bit more power for them, because as a heavily BSD/Linux user the alternative is not having anything at all.
The question is, how can we penalise those that abuse the power of a browser without offering value?
"Do you want to enable Javascript for this website?"
No one does this. We have Steam, GOG, Origin, etc. Why use a substandard implementation of GL?
> Watch videos without flash?
This was possible of out the box in 2001's Windows XP with Internet Explorer. You just used <object> instead of <video>, have people forgotten this?
Nothing has significantly changed in the last decade or more, except for the fact that people think sending several megs down the pipe is acceptable.
> No one does this.
I'm afraid you're wrong there. Browser games are wildly popular around the world, even 3d ones.
You're also failing to mention that <object> required non-standard third-party plugins installed. The novelty of <video> is that browsers are supposed to guarantee those tags will work all the time, without any extra effort required. That is a big step forward, although more from a political rather than technical point of view. It's a dramatic step forward in security, among other things.
> Nothing has significantly changed in the last decade
Sounds very much like "any technology introduced before you're 30 is natural and necessary; anything developed later is an abomination and should be banned" :)
I hate to say it, but the world has changed in the last decade: the iPhone happened. People now experience computing through mobile first. GMail and GMaps had already changed what people expect from the web, but mobile completed the upheaval.
We can disagree on the direction of travel (JS becoming the assembly of the web is, imho, a perversion; like http 2, it feels like an expensive hack implemented on top of technologies that were not meant to be used like that), but saying that nothing has changed is simply wrong.
What I think can happen is a need for security pushing javascript and maybe some parts of css out of the browser and into a some sort of MITM proxy, that doesn't render anything and runs enough javascript in a sandbox just to extract the content, as almost all of the web is still just the content. And those very rare websites that absolutely require javascript can be allowed to pass through after some cleanup and checks for appearance of suspicious and unusual javascript/css code.
I actually preferred Flash, because it was self-contained: an HTML page with an embedded Flash object was still a real HTML page, and I could enable just that Flash object. With JavaScript, typically the entire page requires JavaScript in order to do anything.
> But do enjoy the 'no download', 'run anywhere' nature of web-applications, and, often, I'm willing to trade a bit more power for them, because as a heavily BSD/Linux user the alternative is not having anything at all.
That's an excellent point. I was recently reading through some of my old blog posts, and I was surprised by how much I welcomed web apps at the time, for exactly the reason you mention: I could use them from Linux.
There's a lot to be said for the idea of a relatively secure cross-platform application-delivery technology. What I'm unconvinced of is that HTTP+HTML+TLS+JavaScript is that technology.
2% of CPU to render the news article.
98% to play 3 malfunctioning videos of Santa having a Coke, complete with loud audio.
Granted I think it worked out better in the end, as we now can maintain all UX functionality in a single project rather than having to split across various plugins.
But you're right. I didn't foresee the side effect but it's notable: now it's impossible to kill these ads so easily anymore. Granted, the advertisers would have figured this out and redone everything in JavaScript by now regardless.
Does it? If I reduce the amount of power available to complete a task, but proceed to complete the task anyways, doesn't the phone now need to potentially have the peripherals (particularly, the screen) on for longer as the user waits for a task that has been slowed down to complete, consuming more energy than had it completed the task using 100% CPU?
(Unless using 80% of the CPU can accomplish the same task using less energy (not power) and recoup enough to make up for the losses incurred by needing extra time.)
It isn't intuitive to me at all that what we're doing isn't making phones useless so that their battery lasts all day.
So it can go either way, depending on a lot of the local factors.
Plus I'm pretty sure your base voltage has to be higher to run at higher frequency, and non linearly so, to counter various electrostatic effects.
If you have a scenario where you can disable some thing to make the experience better while maintaining functionality, then why in the world would you ever enable those things? This is simply beyond me.
Any suggestions that improve the situation are simply generic performance optimizations that benefit everyone.
If you disregard memory consumption, CPU load, battery life, then sure.