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Comment by gbh444g | Hacker News Reader

"There is not much left for a Web browser to cover" - this reminded me of the famous "physics is mostly complete at this point."

Web (browser) is the only cross-platform operating system, even if some standards say otherwise. I'm sure we'll see docker-style virtual web environments, cross-machine abstractions to simulate datacenters for distributed computing (GPU and such), PWA-style webapps bootable from USB sticks and functioning as operating systems, various crazy extensions for the upcoming neuralink-style tech, virtual reality frameworks, holographic displays and so on and so forth.

Physics is never complete at any point.

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Physics are not changing, it's our understanding of physics that changes, and yes we are very far from understanding them correctly.

The real questions are:

- For how long do we have energy to keep not understanding things.

- Are the understandings leading to real improvements or just more total energy consumption (for every energy reduction there is an equal or more increase in total energy consumption)?

I'm commited to changing to a Raspberry 4 as my main computer with Raspbian (now called RaspberryOS, is that an improvement though) and Chromium before the year is over.

I wish new standards would consider all the effects before releasing, so we can stop reimplementing the wheel and actually build a bike at some point.

Reinventing the wheel for the browser has more or less stalled at this point, and it's sad because I'm all for that: http://move.rupy.se/file/wheel.jpg

Software really worked ok back in the C64 days too, the only real improvement since then is 3D and my position is that OpenGL (ES) 3 with VAO is good enough.

But you are welcome to use Vulkan, Metal and DirectX 12 if you want!

> Physics are not changing, it's our understanding of physics that changes

No, it's right the way it is. Physics is a science. Physics is the understanding. The universe is terrain and sciences are maps -- though some are more localized and specialized than others.

>Physics is a science

'Physics' refers both to 'our knowledge/study of the physical' and 'the physical' in itself.

The fact that we're comparing a type of software to a school of science speaks volumes

Is it? You could make the same point about engineering, literature, the arts, sociology, ... you get the idea.

I'm not getting the idea. The argument, as I understand it, was that a browser should aspire to be a standardized and relatively simple app enabling a large variety of backends to deliver content, not a never-ending "social experiment" to become overwhelmed by a single party extracting almost all value off the web, and becoming the only party with the resources to implement browsers.

The notion that the world wide web is "finished" at some point is just flawed. Today we do video conferencing, 3D gaming, biometric authentication, photo editing and all sorts of other things on the web. Browsers will evolve along the lines of users needs and developers innovation. If this stops at some point, they will become the new Gopher and something else will come along to replace them.

> Web (browser) is the only cross-platform operating system, even if some standards say otherwise.

I'm really struggling to think of a combination of definitions for "cross-platform" and "operating system" that can make this statement true.

I think they meant language runtime/API (for network, graphics etc.) which is generally how developers see an operating system.

Rather the new POSIX perhaps.

> "There is not much left for a Web browser to cover" - this reminded me of the famous "physics is mostly complete at this point."

Reminded me of microsoft saying they would no longer develop IE6 because browsers were done (i.e. netscape had gone bust)

> I'm sure we'll see docker-style virtual web environments, cross-machine abstractions to simulate datacenters for distributed computing (GPU and such)

Running Windows98 in javascript: http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

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