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Comment by NeedMoreTea | Hacker News Reader

The user is not a part of the conversation. Very little seems to be for the user any more, as every site and browser update seems to demonstrate.

I don't want Chrome or Firefox or any browser to be the OS, I don't want 99% of the gimmicks that are getting added. I can barely tolerate an OS being the OS given how they are steadily moving to less and less actual control and towards knowing best (Windows updates, iOS turning bluetooth off "until tomorrow" etc etc).

Just in case I'm becoming too old to be relevant, neither do my kids and their friends as far as I can see. if anything they're far more simplistic than me - YT, browsing, and a few chat and social apps. So presumably all this junk is for adtech and tracking, for sites to hassle us on yet another device.

Of my friends who work in tech, none of them seem to much like the monster they helped create any more.

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I love the fact that there's an OS-in-OS. It makes writing cross platform applications with easy distribution and access to rich APIs very easy.

This is true, there are benefits. We must ask ourselves collectively whether the benefits(easier cross platform development) are worth the price(increased data collection by gigantic multinational corporations used to manipulate populations to direct user spending).

And the answer is yes, the benefits are worth the price, provided you have a way to analyze a given page to determine whether or not it's a part of that multinational corporation botnet.

I agree that it's great, my big problem is that most web pages don't have anything to do with being an "application", they're just a document. I'd say that 99% of my web browsing has nothing to do with web applications. Hacker News, Wikipedia, search results, news websites, issue trackers... When I look at my browsing history I don't find many webapps.

Of course if you use a fancy webmail, Google docks or even something like Facebook it makes sense to have a full blown webapp but I personally seldom use these. But the thing is whether or not you need those feature they still bloat your web browser because you have to have it. How many websites ought to require JS to function properly out there? How many do?

Have you tried browsing the new Reddit interface on a low power smartphone? So much richness that it's barely usable. All that to display a list of titles or text comments. Or how about Discord which manages to lag in my browser despite being effectively a chat application.

Sometimes less is more. We've made it normal for people to use software that by default automatically runs a turing complete programming language for any random website you browse. If we had a tiny little bit of friction for going from website to webapp developpers and managers would think twice before cramming "rich" features and a thousand ad scripts everywhere.

Hackernews, Wikipedia, issue trackers are all web apps and not documents even if the primary function is to show documents/text. They all have functionality to add/edit comments, etc.

AFAIK the only functionality requiring JS on Hacker News is the up/downvote system. Comments open a new page anyway, so does editing. Wikipedia and issue trackers are the same, you only need to be able to GET and POST content basically. In terms of complexity it's very low.

You're right that they're not completely read-only documents but the interactive functionality is limited enough that it doesn't really qualify as an app. You don't need a client-side turing complete language to implement it, just forms. It's more akin to filling some paper form than interacting with Visual Studio if you see what I mean.

Very little on the web qualifies as a "web app" if the definition of that is, in essence, a simulation of a native application in the browser rather than merely an interactive document. But if that's the case, why are people upset about web apps "taking over" the document paradigm of the web?

Most of the web is still designed around displaying text. Even SPAs that require javascript to display text, for all the faults and valid criticisms that model entails, is still no less of a document in terms of its intended function than a bare HTML page.

The way to solve this is static analysis. I'm not giving up on the Turing machine, so we'll just need a way to analyze a given machine to determine whether it falls in to your low power use case.

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