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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I suppose now you can play 3d games? Watch videos without flash?

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?

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We are not at the point where we can discuss how to penalize websites. Our adversaries own the ecosystem, they are large advertising corporations and they push Javascript on purpose.

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.

> Watch videos without flash?

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.

Toward the height of flash, I recall some local restaurants having nothing but a flash site. If you didn't enable flash, the site didn't work. Much like today with javascript.

Yes, always restaurants and designer's portfolios had the flash-only sites.

> 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?"

I really /really/ like that idea, but it will be an annoyance for 99% of people with how frequently it will trigger. People will expect a crappy experience until they click "OK" and the button will be blamed for getting in the way.

"This website uses cookies"

> I suppose now you can play 3d games?

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.

> > I suppose now you can play 3d games?

> 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.

<video> is great - and doesn't require javascript! But developers seem to layer it on top anyway.

Unity has WebGL export, and people do use that.

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