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Comment by blackoil | Hacker News Reader

Let me paint a dystopian picture.

:::Year 2032:::

Web browsers are now a relic of the past used by a small cult of nerds and promoted by fanatics at EFF. Now world runs on SuperApps by Google, Facebook and Amazon. These are "Open" platforms which provide content authoring and hosting platform, ad networks, micropayment and discovery services for a small fees of 30%. The content is easily sharable across except for a recent glitch in Amazon and Google platforms causing them to be unable to interlink. Content of these is only searchable on Bing and Google.

Some Evil countries like Russia, China and Iran block access to these and run on copied platforms developed by Yandex, Baidu and Alibaba.

With a notable reduction in junk sites, better performance and security the Internet was never a better place.

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I think your "dystopian picture", while very interesting, is an extrapolation the current mobile landscape, where internet usage is already mostly done through social media apps rather than browsers. This, of course, gives free rein to advertisement.

However, the main reason these apps gained all this traction is that the Web is simply not made for small devices with touchscreens. It's the discomfort of using web browsers on mobile that created the tipping incentive to adopt these streamlined apps. As long as people keep using more comfortable devices (eg. laptops) that can easily browse the Web, this segment will not have that "discomfort" incentive to move away from the Web and onto more restricted platforms.

Yes, there could be other incentives - you mention junk sites and security issues - but these aren't strong enough to outweigh the main advantage of browsers, which is the breadth and momentum of the Web, something that users still value. I hope I'm right.

True is current scenario, but if tomorrow stack overflow removes the website and is available only from a Browser2.0, millions of techies will install it. Youtube / NYTimes /... are even more impactful.

The idea is not to disable ability to run browser and millions of website will continue to exist, but Top 1000 web properties and 99.9% of traffic and money will move out.

In current scenario, you can still run a BBS and share some really interesting content, but it will be a niche of nerds and fanatics.

The fault lies in web design more than hardware. When the iPhone came out, suddenly mobile sites had to be created because the device was not powerful enough to run the sort of web design paradigms that were in vogue in 2007.

However, if the iPhone came out in 1997 when websites were mostly static html pages, provided the browser could wrap text, it would be an excellent experience. An iPhone's screen is about the size of a few paragraphs from a newspaper column; it's not tiny, in fact its perfectly sized for ergonomic reading. The most praised reading apps on mobile these days are just a plain background and a block of text consuming the whole screen, with the rest of the ui getting out of your way.

Mobile web browsers existed long before the iPhone. At the time mobile web browsing meant using regular GSM with EDGE if you were lucky. Remember people were browsing the web on feature phones and PDAs like the Treo and Windows Mobile stuff.

Haha, you've described today, only those big app-platforms run on the web. I'd prefer them to be native apps. That would be more CPU efficient and devices in turn would be cheaper and effectively more powerful. Can you comfortably run a few of these at the same time on a 10 year old netbook? Not currently.

I'm in favor of retiring the web. Not that it will happen any time soon. How many reasons do we need? Private information leakage alone should not be tolerated. Accessibility? Attack surface? Resource efficiency?

Obviously I'm missing the point, because none of this explains why internet is what it is. I sure wish it were simpler.

> the Web is simply not made for small devices with touchscreens

I think that you are 100% incorrect: the Web (i.e., HTML) is perfect for small devices with touchscreens. As asdff notes, late-90s websites would work perfectly on a mobile device. It's all the cruft we have spent the past twenty years polluting the Web and our browsers with that doesn't work so well in a mobile context.

A mobile phone is perfectly capable of displaying images and text. HTML is perfectly capable of displaying images and text in a device-independent fashion: that was its raison d'etre, as I recall.

I think where we went wrong was assuming that browser windows would be maximised on a desktop screen. That, and JavaScript.

> The content is easily shareable across

I think that in such vision we'd be also slowly marching towards controlled, approved by vaguely described but tolerated by everyone "standards" (political and cultural), DRM-ed safe content from those SuperApps providers. It wouldn't happen fast but that'd be the direction. The remaining classic pages would be forced to transfer themselves into new reality or completely cease to exist. The "alternative private Internet projects" would be outlawed by hands of politicians who'd be open lobbyists of big corporations.

Realistically speaking, we're already one foot, or hell, leg inside the world and times where the Internet belongs to few corporations who are giving us software, services and content and it's nothing surprising that some countries are trying to fight these namely american monopolies with own solutions at the same time blocking by legal means access to what majority of world is using.

The US will be copying Asia in this case. China already has super apps like this and Grab & GoJek already expressed their interest in following their lead. US is way behind.

I believe GP's statement on international apps was sarcastic and subtly pointed out that this technological siloization would foster narrow worldviews.

Language silos our world view more than tech could. If you read a news article about Greece that isn't in Greek, chances are you are reading a cherry picked one off story that the newspaper thought might be of general interest to English speaking audiences, leaving behind an entire reality that is invisible to your world view, having never uttered Greek to steep yourself in the most thorough relevant information, or even been to Greece to see it all for yourself. The Greece you've constructed in your head doesn't even exist.

Yes. Western people really can't understand this. Western media can publish only negative facts about some country and this creates completely distorted world view. They don't even have to publish fake news (although they were pioneers in this also).

Centralised platforms like Google also contribute to this because they can (and in case of Google they do it indeed) lift up negative articles and bury positive.

Greece is part of the West. Some even say they invented it.

Current West is populated by the people that were called "barbarians" in Greece, if I'm not mistaken.

The world is already siloed and narrow minded and always was. E.g. OP writes "evil countries like Russia, China, Iran". It's a very narrow view that is very far from truth. It is formed exclusively by western media and nothing else where another evil country - US - tries to defile every other country in order to loot it using direct (invasion) or indirect (sanctions and neo-colonial politics) measures.

I think ani-ani is right in their interpretation though, and that's why "Evil" was capitalized. Viewed as evil, not necessarily truly evil at all.

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