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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

What.... why? Why must we insist upon piling so many features on top of browsers? It's a web browser, not an application platform...

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>It's a web browser, not an application platform...

I'm assuming you have just arrived from 1996. I can't wait until you find out who our President is!

"Oh God, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger, isn't it?"

I hate to break it to you, but the best interface for scientific python is Jupyter Notebook, which already runs in the browser. This just moves the execution of the code into the browser also.

It's also not adding any features that weren't already there, unless you're objecting to the entire WebAssembly project, in which case I guess that's allowed, but a bit off-topic.

Because it is. Maybe not the platform we would've designed, but it's one we have.

Welcome to the world of the Browser Application platfRrm fun. I call it B.A.R.F

You're using a web app now.

Is this bad for the long term preservation of knowledge? Sure. But it's the world we made.

How are webapps worse for the preservation if knowledge than native apps? I can't open most of the apps I used on a daily basis 10 years ago.

For reasonably complex documents PDF/A is a pretty good choice for long-term archival:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

That said, the comparison I was trying to make was the pre webapp web to the current web. We have AOL today, just not one big company running it. It will mostly be lost because it's not legal to save it.

The future will know us through scraped videos from Youtube before it was taken down suddenly and without warning in the mid 21st century due to corporate politics and/or the takeover of the government in DC by descendants of the house of Habsburg.

It doesn't add any features to the browser. It's just a Web Assembly application.

This is not a new feature. It's a wasm library/app that you can use to code for your browser in Python.

So, it's actually pretty cool.

Also, the web browser has been an application platform for nearly 20 years now, so I'm not sure I understand your remark.

It's not included in the browser, it's just a web page.

Browsers are application platforms and have been for a while. It is the most portable and accessible method of software, if the features you need fit within its sandbox.

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