I’m finally groking what rms has been banging on about for so long. It is completely unacceptable that we are running software that does this to the user. Users need to be empowered and able to run code that they can control.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<script>let on true;</script>
<body onclick="on = !on; this.style.background = on ? 'white' : 'black'">
[1] http://zxing.org/w/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chld=L&choe=UTF-...
i.e. QR-coded dataURI document
data:text/html;charset=utf-8,<!DOCTYPE html><title>Screen light</title><html onclick=on=!on;this.style.background=on%3F'white':'black'><body onload=on=true> data:text/html,<title>Screen Light</title><html onclick=o=!o;style.background=o%3F0:'black';style.color=o%3F0:'white'><body onload=o=1><h1>Screen Light</h1><p>Turn your screen into a light source<br>Tap to toggle<p><a href=https:/news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19069487>Source[0] Check out for example this HTML / SVG sketchbook: https://gist.github.com/myfonj/c8ce74bf549e19600026ce9022388... [1] http://tinyurl.com/selcoditor (see network log) [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2017/11/27/blocking-top-le...
Other applications work much better for that, though they may or may not recognise non-http URIs e.g. here scanbot just displays the textual content and you're on the hook for copy/pasting it wherever you need.
Sadly, copypasting resulting URI as plaintext is most probably the only option for modern browsers, because any other way of top level frame navigation to dataURI document is blocked. (Besides existing bookmark, that is.) I keep forgetting this, sorry for hurried "in theory it must work great" shout out.
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/scan-qr-codes-firefox-a...
Case study: people copy-pasting random code into their Myspace profiles
I suspect you can get a better coding experience by connecting your Glitch account to Github and then using an editor that works well on your device.
The PWA part of Glitch is completely under your control.
But I'm curious how much download weight matters, outside of as a proxy for "how much bloated ad bullshit is hiding inside the app bundle"?
I'd wager the difference between a 2KB PWA and a 5MB or 30MB native app download is relatively insignificant — in storage space, in cellular data use, in initial download time — to your average user when compared to streaming a film on Netflix or downloading a F2P game with 100MBs to GBs of assets.
(where "average user" is assuming most of these apps are only localized in English and only available in largely-western countries — totally get how the story is very different in emerging markets)
2kB will feel instant. 5MB will feel mostly quick. 30MB will feel like it had to earn it.
When things are instant then it feels like magic. It's sad that having all those super fast machines everywhere we have to deal with so much bullshit. Your computer can push through gigabytes of memory on a second. Does it feel this way? That's why people still use CLI, at least there, many things feel instant and when not it's usually reasonable.
It's not only download speed, it's also verification time, compilation/optimization and whatever else happens during install. All of those will take longer the bigger the app is.
Similarly the problem with JavaScript on sites currently is not only download time and request count bloat. It's significant by itself, but it just takes time to even parse all this code and I did not start on execution.
But at the same time for me the proxy effect of "how much bloat and bullshit did they cram into it" is as important and can't be dismissed.
While bundle size might sometimes correlate with cold start times for PWAs (depending on whether it's JS code that's bloating the bundle, or other media assets that won't trigger an initial parsing + evaluation hit), that's less likely to be the case with native apps.
And that's just one usage, by one user. Multitply by thousands of usages and billions of users. It's inexcusable from a craftsmanship viewpoint.
On Android, iOS, Firefox extensions, and many websites, you can't give permission for one thing without giving permission for everything. Or those "I accept cookies popups" -- until recently, you couldn't choose which cookies you wanted to accept, so either you accept tracking cookies in order to use basic functionality, or you head elsewhere. The application developer could be a good citizen and request on the permissions needed -- but it's just easier to request that they be able to read and modify any and all data, regardless of their need or desire to do so.
On Windows, Unix, and other "system-level" permission systems, you have a different problem. There, there is no real ability to verify what an application is trying to do with its elevated permissions -- it just wants to be given God power, even if it only needs permission to do one or two very specific things in one or two very specific locations.
In fact, the web browser is probably the most accessible place to roll out a whitelisting-based permission system. It has already been demonstrated successfully with uBlock Matrix and uBlock Origin -- you can block specific types of activity coming from specific subdomains. Some sites break completely when you block the few specific elements you don't want to see, but most work just fine, or at least close to fine. Being able to whitelist specific Javascript APIs (e.g. the battery API, the ambient light API, etc) is a logical next step in my opinion.
An OS-level analogy would be the ability to block specific syscalls made by specific processes, optionally only when spawned by a specific parent process.
The most relevant result I could find for "linux on the web" was https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com/ which doesn't seem to be relevant at all.
He also posted a comment in the thread with some more details:
> It makes heavy use of the HTML5 Filesytem for local storage, as well as Native Client for vim, python, and plugin codecs to enable highly configurable realtime a/v streaming via WebRTC peer connections. Windowed HTML5/JS applications can be developed live within the site itself. There is a feature to stream terminal sessions to each other, in order to show how to efficiently use vim to develop applications, for example.
I try to stay away from the above kinds of sweeping generalizations about the whole thing nowadays. It is best to let it speak for itself and evolve in its own good time.
Also, link number 5, at https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com/shell.os is for people who just want to poke around the deep system internals via a command line. For that, you need to use the "import" command in order to pull in libraries of commands. For instance, running a command like:
$ import fs && vim
should open up my custom-made vim clone.
There are plenty of high-quality mobile apps on F-Droid, even with downloadable source. This is purely a PEBKAC issue.