Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

> Let a website stay a website.

So you still need Chrome/Firefox, and Gnome/KDE/Mate/whatever to run them in.

I think the OP's underlying unhappiness is more that "the people who want to use unix now are fundamentally different people who want different things that the people who wanted to 'learn unix' 35 years ago.

(Though I'll bet 80+% of the people they taught to pipe ls to wc were within weeks using irc and mutt whenever they were looking the other way in class, because for most of us people are more fun than machines, and back then we used irc/usenet instead of Twitter/Facebook, but to fill the same sort of niche.)

View on HN

It's not that hard to build a browser (I'll say this because I've done it, and there are plenty of people who have done it better.) It's just tedious and not something you can put on the app store.

> It's not that hard to build a browser

One that reliably runs all the javascript needed to support modern Twitter/Facebook/GMail/whatever style webapps? I mean _maybe_, if you're pulling in someone else's code as dependencies to deal with your javascript runtime and your rendering engine. A lot of people could hammer out lynx or w3m in a weekend, but not something that'll run Twitter. (Hell, the Safari Tech Preview occasionally chokes on Titter...)

I liked the web better with HTML2.

There were simple technologies which did a lot too, like Hypercard.

The creeping complexity of the web isn't something which had to happen. I understand the reasons it did happen, but in an alternative timeline, without Netscape vs. IE, the dot-com boom/bust, and the whole Netscape meltdown, it might not have happened.

People were building sophisticated applications which did a lot in the days of NeXTStep, BeOS, SGI, and Amiga, without this massive complexity build-up. Altavista scaled well too.

Just like people got tired of "fancy" user interfaces and minimalism became somewhat fashionable, I hope the same will happen architecturally, possibly after especially bad yet-another vulnerability and breach.

>One that reliably runs all the javascript needed to support modern Twitter/Facebook/GMail/whatever style webapps?

That can stay within the browser or some shared library. It absolutely doesn't need to affect unix/linux architecture in any way.

You're vastly underestimating the effort required to go from a simple HTML renderer to a full-blown web browser. See [1].

[1]: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

> So you still need Chrome/Firefox

I think for most people learning unix, understanding chrome/firefox boils down to knowing "there is a chrome/firefox repo somewhere, it gets compiled/packaged for your distro somewhere and has a bunch of dependencies". DE doesn't need to have any provisions for Twitter specifically either, apart from what is already essential for most GUI applications.

I get what you mean, I guess I just twitched reading "unix twitter client" being something we expect from unix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com